


Continuous, the sea-thrust

by lbmisscharlie



Series: Still the Walls Do Not Fall [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Catholic Steve Rogers, Clothing as Identity Marker, F/F, Family, Female Bucky Barnes, Female Steve Rogers, Friendship, Gender Identity, Genderqueer Bucky Barnes, Genderqueer Character, Genderswap, Identity Issues, Identity liminality, Jewish Bucky Barnes, Lots of feelings sex, Masculinity and Butchness, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Slash, Protective Bucky Barnes, Protectiveness, Rule 63, Wartime, they'll get around to the touching parts later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-08
Updated: 2016-10-08
Packaged: 2018-08-20 00:33:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8230078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: “You’re so strong,” Steve says, like it means something else. Bucky swallows. 

  “It’s a good thing,” she says, finally, “if I’ve gotta carry you home.”
Bucky Barnes prepares for war.





	

**Author's Note:**

> My usual and eternal thanks to beta and friend extraordinaire, [Peninsulam](http://archiveofourown.org/users/peninsulam/pseuds/peninsulam).
> 
> This fic covers roughly the same time period as [Half at-home in the world](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7655410) and is best read in conjunction with it. 
> 
> A note on content: this fic contains a graphic scene of animal slaughter and a graphic scene of human injury within a slaughterhouse.

_Brooklyn, 1938_

With unspoken agreement, the whole family tries to spare Steve any decisions. Ma calls the funeral home, Dad puts together the food for the wake, Rebecca orders flowers. Bucky stays by Steve’s side, as much as she can. Steve won’t come home with her until after the funeral, so Bucky stays there, in the little apartment marked all over by Sarah Rogers’s hands. 

In her black dress, lent to her by Susanna and just her size even though Susanna’s four years younger, Steve is wan, sallow. She doesn’t speak at all until it’s time for the eulogy, and then she gives a short speech with a clear voice, quiet but free of tremors. Around the bursting pain she feels for her friend, Bucky is proud. 

The things Steve says of Sarah Rogers are even more than the mournful memories of a barely-grown daughter; rather, they are full to bursting with grieved pride, for her Ma’s care, love, and perseverance. For the way she planted her feet against naysayers and disease alike. They’ll neither of them grow up to be nurses, but Bucky figures she and Steve could do worse than picking up some of Mrs. Rogers’s grit.

After the funeral, she takes Steve home with her and tucks her into one of the beds in the attic room. It’s hardly the first time Steve has slept there, but tonight, curled tight with her back to the room, she looks smaller than she did even at ten, and Bucky can do nothing but slip in behind her and hold her close and tight. All she can offer: the meager sort of comfort Steve more often than not threw off when sick, unwilling to be touched and coddled. Tonight, Steve curls up tighter and lets Bucky stay there.

++

As she knocks on the door, she tries hard to push down the swell of guilt threatening her throat. She’s not happy, she isn’t, she tells herself as her new landlady pushes a key into her hand, already closing the door. To be happy now, with Steve’s mother just buried, feels treasonous; and yet it is just that circumstance that has allowed her to be here, at this door, holding her very own key in her hand. 

Bucky had had the money saved up for a while, but she knew what her Ma’s face would do if she announced she was moving out to live on her very own, and that was the kind of quiet, guilt-ridden torture that would have the most seasoned rascals apologizing, changing their minds, and promising to be good to their mothers. And she couldn’t imagine living with anyone else but Steve; but Steve never would, not so long as her Ma needed her. 

So: she can’t be happy. To be happy now, that it took Sarah Rogers’s death to bring about this free, flitting feeling in her chest, would be the rankest thing she’s ever done as Steve’s friend. 

She palms the key; it warms to her skin. She’ll wait a few days to tell Steve.

++

Ma had greeted her just as usual, hands on her shoulders and a kiss on both cheeks, but after the candles are lit and the Kiddush said, she directs all of her questions to Steve, so Bucky knows she’s still in hot water. 

She hadn’t shouted, not a lick, when Bucky told her she’d found an apartment; she wouldn’t, not with Steve upstairs and still half-dazed in mourning. Bucky had said they’d be moving out in a week, and Ma had stared at her, hard, throat working to swallow, before turning away to grip the edge of the kitchen counter. She’d breathed out a hard little huff and after a long moment’s silence, had said, “You two had better take care of each other. This world’s not getting any nicer.” For girls, she doesn’t say; for girls like you.

Ma had helped Bucky pack, silently and tight-lipped, and had at some point decided to send Rebecca over with her hope chest, so Bucky had figured if she wasn’t forgiven, exactly, then her Ma at least saw the hard edge of need that impelled Bucky. Once they’d proved themselves capable of surviving, Ma would lose her anger, she thought.

She’s not so sure, now. 

Ma’s asked after Steve’s art classes, and Steve is telling them about the round of painting she’s doing now – “Still life,” she says. “Gosh, working in color is still such a trick.”

“She’s painting more fruit than she’s eating,” Bucky interjects, but no one laughs. Steve looks at her, a shallow glance under her eyes, and Bucky lifts her eyebrows. _I’m trying._

“And how is the heat? Have enough coal?” Ma presses forward.

“Yes, ma’am.” Steve always gets extra polite when Bucky’s parents ask about money. Vestiges of Sarah Rogers’s icy tight smile when things got thinner than usual. Steve’s stubborn enough to want to go it alone; at least she’s also sometimes smart enough to know she can’t. 

“It’s not so cold yet, Ma,” Rebecca says. “And their place is real cozy.” Her parents haven’t been there yet, not in their five weeks’ residence. Steve asked once, at the beginning, and hasn’t again. They’ll come around, Bucky tells herself.

After dinner, they retreat up to the little attic room that had been Bucky’s and, for a while, Steve’s. Rebecca follows, and manhandles Steve onto the floor so she can sit behind her, on the bed, and pull the haphazard hair pins from her drooping hair. 

“Such a wonderful, touching family supper,” Bucky says to the ceiling. Her foot bumps against Rebecca’s elbow, but neither move. 

“I think Dad would be over it, if Ma wasn’t so insistent on being mad.” Looking down, Bucky can just see, over the shallow rises of her own body, Steve’s profile, jaw a bit too tight, and Rebecca’s hands combing out her hair. “And,” Rebecca adds, apologetically, “Ma wouldn’t be so mad if it was just you, on your own.”

Oh. Bucky hadn’t really thought – “We’re fine,” Steve says. “I’m fine.”

Rebecca tugs a little on her hair, to catch Steve’s eye when she tilts her chin back in response. “ _I_ know that,” she says. She starts a braid near Steve’s temple. “She doesn’t understand why you need to –” She shrugs at Bucky.

“She never has,” Bucky says. It’s not at all that Ma doesn’t love her, more that her life has been one long line of decisions that make Ma narrow her eyes and go tight and silent: her fights, and the skinny little friend she brought home from one of them; her skinned knees and bruised eyes; boxing lessons begged off of Dad; dresses unworn in the back of her closet; a job at the slaughterhouse instead of a nice office; an apartment to herself, with Steve. 

A long beat of silence. “Just keep coming back,” Rebecca says. 

++

It doesn’t take long to settle into habits, the shape of their days taking familiar form. They take turns with most things, because as it turns out neither of them are all that talented at keeping a house. Decent, sure, but when Rebecca brings a stack of _Good Housekeeping_ magazines when she visits and drops them, pointedly, on the table, Bucky can’t really argue with her point. 

Bucky has to haul herself up at six for work, a chore and a trial, but Steve wakes early as a matter of course, even though her work and school hours are more irregular, so she usually pokes at Bucky on her way out of the bedroom to piss and wash up. 

Most mornings, Bucky grumbles at her and turns over in bed, snoozing until she hears Steve’s footsteps returning. Today, she hears the tell-tale scrape of the door and kicks her coverlet and sheet aside to tangle at the foot of the bed. Swinging her feet to the floor, she sits at the edge of the bed and yawns, rubbing her eyes, and then drags herself into the kitchen to scrounge up some breakfast.

“We’re out of eggs,” Steve says as Bucky looks blankly into the cupboard. It takes a moment to register. 

“Toast is fine,” Bucky says, though she does like a boiled egg with her breakfast. Instead of answering, Steve reaches around her to the little cup of change they keep on the counter and finds a dime. She slips on her own shoes and Bucky’s work jacket to run down the stairs. 

Bucky stares at the stovetop for another long minute before her mind conjures up coffee. It’s nearly ready by the time Steve gets back, dragging the door open slowly.

In one hand a carton of eggs, in the other the newspaper folded back, she’s reading while she walks. “Bucky,” she says, even though Bucky’s right there. She drops the eggs a little clumsily onto the counter and reaches for Bucky, eyes still on the newspaper. “You need to –” 

Bucky steps closer; Steve tilts the newspaper so she can read the headline. _Nazis Smash, Loot and Burn Jewish Shops and Temples._

Coffee forgotten, Bucky grasps the edge of the newspaper, taking it from Steve to spread out on the table, and reads. Shops broken, synagogues burned, people turned out of their houses, beaten, arrested. 

Steve has long since finished reading, but she stands close to Bucky. Bucky’s pulse is too rapid in her throat. “What do you think they’ll do next?” she says, hardly a whisper. Steve shakes her head. Any possible answer is unspeakable. 

Leaning against the edge of the rickety table, in the still-chilled air, it’s too easy to think about rocks flying through their windows, about the smell of kerosene and the strike of a match, about a crowd of people dragging her out the front door, and Steve for being there with her. She shivers; Steve grabs her hand. It isn’t the first time she’s worried about someone beating her in the street. For being, well, everything she is; being Jewish is only a bit of a reason for people to take their fists to her. That’s why she’s learned to hold her own.

“Someone will do something,” Steve mutters. “The world won’t just watch this happen.”

Bucky draws a deep breath. To anyone else, Steve would sound naïve, a little girl with too much brightness in her thoughts, but Bucky can hear the harsh, angry edge to her words, the bitten-off roughness that means that Steve would take on the whole Nazi party if only she could get to them.

That Friday, Ma holds her a little longer in her hug, and Steve, too. After supper, she shoos Rebecca, Susanna, and Miriam away, and Dad pulls out a small box and pushes it across the table. “I should have given you this right away,” Ma says, squeezing one of Bucky’s hands. “Forgive me.”

Bucky flips open the top of the box, finding a small silver mezuzah case. She runs her fingers over the engravings on the front. A hard, aching little swelling rises in her throat. “Ma,” she says; can’t say anything more. 

“You’re watching out for each other,” Ma says, more a statement than a question, and Bucky nods around the knot in her throat. Steve is silent, though Bucky knows she at least knows what the little mezuzah case and the slip of parchment inside are; Bucky’d explained the matching one on her family’s doorframe when they were just kids, and Steve had copied her absent, instinctive little touch to the silver case each time they walked through the front door. 

“We’re safe,” Steve says, finally, just the right thing; Bucky feels a warm, fond rush of gratitude for her. Ma grasps Steve around the ear, pulling her close to kiss her on the temple, and grips Bucky’s palm with her other hand. 

++

Steve shows up at home a few days later with a wallop of an egg bruising on her forehead and cut-up palms. Uncharacteristically, she won’t tell Bucky who or why she’d been fighting. It’s been a long time since either of them have come home with anything like that marking their bodies, at least from anything other than a clean fight in a boxing ring. Turns out you hit an age when even bullies don’t want to fight girls. 

Though, they sometimes want to push around bulldaggers minding their own business after a night’s drinks, but that’s not something Bucky shares with Steve.

Thing about Steve, though, is that she’s definitely a girl, tiny and big-eyed and with a mess of blonde hair, and is definitely not a queer, so there’s no real reason for her to be getting into fights with fellas at all. Except she’s Steve, which means when she hears or sees something she doesn’t like, she has a way of poking and prodding at a fella until he either gives up and walks away or snaps. It has not, yet, mattered how many times Bucky’s told her to back down – they both of them know what it looks like when a guy is too angry to care what damage his punches do, they’re not ignorant – because Steve still somehow figures if she gets in a couple of hits it’ll teach them a lesson. The types of men who will hit someone who looks like Steve, no matter her taunting, are not likely to learn, Bucky thinks.

“You’re going to come home dead one of these days,” Bucky says, dabbing at the bump on Steve’s forehead with a washcloth, making sure there’s no broken skin.

“That doesn’t even make sense,” Steve mutters. Bucky gives a pointed, disapproving silence, which must work because Steve shifts in her chair.

Now’s the time when she would usually offer a defense, say _he was saying something about_ – or _he had this girl_ – or, once, _there was a puppy, and it was just little, and_ –. But today’s she’s silent, compliant as Bucky manhandles her head one way to see all of the bruise, brushing her hair away from her temple to see how far it extends. 

“Unbutton,” Bucky says, plucking at the first button on Steve’s dress. Steve looks up at her, startled. “Gotta check your shoulder.” The fabric of her sleeve is ripped – no blood, but it’s a little dirty, and it probably doesn’t hurt by the way Steve looks at it, surprised. Bucky still wants to check. 

Steve unbuttons down to the waist and shimmies the dress off her shoulders, and that alone confirms in Bucky’s mind that she feels guilty about the fight, or the reason for it. There’s no skin broken on her shoulder, just a long, red scrape that Bucky tends to with the washcloth, making sure there’s no dirt in it. They’ll have to darn her dress, and it’s a shame – Steve hasn’t had a dress quite so new in a while.

Bare to the world, the skin across her shoulders and chest is pale, dotted with a few small freckles. Her collarbone still juts out too much; Bucky dreams, sometimes, of being rich enough to feed Steve meat and butter and ice cream every day, until she’s fat as anything and her body won’t shake in the cold. Underneath her slip and her yellowing bra, the slight fullness of her breasts lifts and falls with her breath, a little ragged on the exhales but steady. 

They dress together in the mornings and share laundry duty; Bucky knows every piece of Steve’s clothes, from her hand-me-down floral dresses to her cotton panties to the socks she still wears pulled up to her knees. Steve’s the only one who knows that Bucky, half the time, wears men’s shorts instead of panties under her trousers. They have bathed and changed together since they both wore knee socks and buckled Mary Janes. There’s nothing unfamiliar here. So it shouldn’t hit her like a sucker punch to the gut how soft and pale Steve’s skin looks, just at the top edge of her slip, and how the breasts she’d finally gotten at sixteen looked like Bucky could cup them in her palms and feel Steve’s ribcage against her fingertips. 

She wrenches her eyes back to the scrape on Steve’s shoulder, dabs at it one last time. “I think that one’s fine,” she says, and looks away, busying herself with the little pile of bandages she’d grabbed while Steve pulls her dress back up. “Anywhere else?”

Steve shakes her head, then at Bucky’s lifted eyebrow, says, “No, Bucky, I promise.” Chastened, soft; Bucky immediately feels a rush of nausea, like shame – or maybe it’s shame, like nausea. 

Packing up the bandages and antiseptic balm, Bucky says, “So, you gonna tell me?”

Steve scuffs her foot against the floor, a childish habit she only has when she’s thinking about lying. Bucky remembers it from too many times looking down at the ground with Mrs. Roger’s disapproving glare above them. Finally, though, she says, “This jerk – he was saying nasty things. About. About what happened over in Germany. About Jews.”

Oh. Bucky fumbles a stretched-out elastic bandage; it unfurls from her hands to unroll across the floor. “You don’t gotta – you don’t need to defend me,” she says, hotly. 

“Hey,” Steve says, grabbing her by the forearm. Startled, Bucky looks at her face-on; Steve is angry. “They’re not the sort of things anyone should be saying about anyone. Hell, that anyone should be thinking. I wouldn’t listen to it even if you weren’t Jewish.”

“They’re just bullies,” Bucky says. She doesn’t say the rest of what she’s thinking, which is somewhere close to _if you hurt yourself defending me I’ll kill you myself._ She pulls one of Steve’s hands to her, flips it palm up, and gently starts to brush the gravel and bits of grit away. The cuts are shallow, just on the meaty part of her hand, like she’d been pushed down to the ground. Bucky grits her teeth together.

“I don’t like bullies,” Steve says, as if it’s that simple. As if it’s only a matter of one resolute set of fists. Bucky sits back and looks at her. Her forehead will bruise up something ugly, her shoulder’s fine, and her hands will heal without too much trouble, Bucky figures. Her damned stubborn attitude, though, that’s permanent. 

“Maybe you oughta wait for backup next time,” Bucky says, more mildly than she feels. 

Steve smiles, looks at her hands. “You taught me how to fight,” she says, which is true. “Have you ever waited for backup?”

“Shut up, punk,” Bucky says, because that’s true, too. 

“Jerk,” Steve says, fondly, and then, “Are you gonna bandage my hands or just sit there looking at ‘em?”

“Tie ‘em up, more like,” Bucky mutters, even as she’s wondering if that’d even stop Steve from getting belligerent. 

“Who’d cook you supper?” Steve says, angelic; Bucky fixes her with a glare, but wraps the gauze gently, snugly. 

“I do alright,” she says, even while she’s forcing down an unexpected, panicked lump of a thought, of not having Steve around. She swallows it down; it will happen, someday, and there’s no use spooking about it before it comes around. Tying the ends of the bandage off in a crooked knot, Bucky releases Steve’s hands and stands. “I’ll prove it; you stay there and look pretty while I cook.”

Steve folds her hands in her lap, crosses her ankles, looks demure, and it’s so damned strange that Bucky nearly takes her own fingers off when laughing and trying to chop up an end-of-season zucchini. “You ain’t convincing anyone,” she says, and Steve gives her the bird. Bucky’s heart throbs in her chest.

++

The telephone rings and rings, and by the third call she picks up, Bucky knows exactly what the person on the other end will say, even if she doesn’t know who will be saying it. There is, apparently, a nasty bout of ‘flu going around, and by the time the shift bell rings, they’re down ten men. Four more send word with the fellas who do show up, half of whom look a little green themselves. 

Smits is railing; they’ve got four dozen pigs coming in today, in addition to the usual work of salting, rotating, cutting, and packing of the aged meat in cold storage. Bucky looks down at her desk. There wasn’t much on it she couldn’t do tomorrow: payroll doesn’t need to be done till Friday and invoices go out on Tuesdays. “I could – I could fill in,” she says to Smits. He eyes her. 

“What do you know about it?” he says. 

“I’ve been working here for two years,” she says, a little abruptly. She knows it’s not the same. He hasn’t said no so he’s thinking. “Angela can handle the phones,” she supplies hopefully. Angela is his daughter. She doesn’t like Bucky, and her quick and abrupt manner on the phone. Businesslike, Bucky thinks; she suspects Angela were term it something more like _mannish_. But Bucky has a mind for the math, so accounts and payroll go easily. It’s all organization, a dash of strategy, but she’s not always so good at being charming to men on the phone who want her to be pliant and accommodating. 

“Just for today,” Smits says finally. “And you listen to what Mac tells you.” 

Bucky grins. She finds a jumpsuit and wrestles herself into it. She wraps the ankles, tucking them into her boots like she’s seen the men do, and laces her boots up tight. 

Mac gives her a questioning look when she shows up on the floor. “I’m going to help out,” she says with a grin. 

“Like hell you are,” Mac says, but he’s smiling. She knows every man on the floor – has to for payroll, though she probably would anyway. Greases the gears, makes it all go smoothly, if you know what’s happening in a man’s life before he comes at you with a complaint. Mac she knows even better, because he’s a long-timer at her dad’s gym. She’s boxed Mac once or twice but he outweighs her by half again, and last time he knocked her down easily after she provoked him into it with little kidney punches. 

The floor is frantic already. The pig truck will be arriving any minute and they haven’t yet cleared out the freezer and packaged up Friday’s cuts. “Where do you want me, boss?” Bucky says, irrepressibly cheerful. 

Mac thinks for a moment. He opens his mouth to direct her somewhere when Joe calls out, “Mac, you know where we put greenhorns.” 

“She’s not green,” Mac says. “She’s just filling in.” Joe spits on the floor. 

“Bad luck not to,” he says. Mac narrows his eyes. He glances Bucky up and down like seeing her for the first time. He knows she’s strong, has seen her in the ring. Bucky puffs up her shoulders and holds her hands open in front of her, compliant. 

“I don’t mind,” she says, not entirely sure where she’s sending herself. Mac finally jerks his head in assent. 

He leads her to the slaughter pens. The truck has just arrived, butted up against the gate, which opens with a squeal. The stench is strong but Bucky knows it will only get worse as the morning goes on. The guy at the gate opens the back of truck, letting it clang against the gatepost, and the snorting, sniffling roar of hogs fills the air. They push and shove to get out, frantic. Falling over each other, the pigs tumble from the truck into the first holding pen. The ground is covered with clean straw and the pigs smell like shit. 

“All right,” Mac says, drawing her attention. He holds out a device. Bucky knows what it does even if she hasn’t used it before. It’s not a hard job, physically, to shoot the hogs with the bolt gun as they come through the chutes, but emotionally, well. That’s why they make greenhorns do this one first. If you can’t stomach the sight of some blood and some brains and you can’t stomach the thought of putting creatures to their deaths with your own two hands, then you shouldn’t work in a slaughterhouse at all. 

He shows her the trigger mechanism and how to draw back the bolt and tells her where to aim. “The forehead, above the eyes,” he says. “Then get the hell out of the way if you don’t want a kick or two. Kills ‘em, but they thrash.”

The bolt gun is a little heavy in her hands – small, but dense. Mac sets her at the front of the first chute, Joe across from her. The guys have already started moving the pigs, herding them one by one from the main holding pen down the narrow run to the row of chutes, a tight maze that lines them up single-file. It’s Bucky’s job to go down the row and shoot them. Two clanging gates and a clatter of hooves, and the first two-hundred-pound butcher hog is a foot away and snorting.

Joe’s there to back her up in case something goes wrong – a hog with a fearful streak can do damage – but also to gentle the pigs. He grasps its ear, wearing thick leather gloves to avoid getting caught in its jaws, and murmurs, “Okay, okay.” He moves his thumb, rubbing its ear, and it stands nearly still.

“Okay,” he says again, this time to Bucky. She brings the bolt gun up, presses it to the pig’s forehead. Breathes: one, two. Pull. 

With a bone-shaking crack the bolt gun engages, shattering the front skull of the pig. It stills, then slumps to the ground like its legs have collapsed. Joe takes a step back, and once Bucky’s mind catches up, she does too, out of the way of the pig’s legs, jerking with the last unconscious movements of its heart.

“Next,” Joe says, and they move down to the next chute. Three guys come in behind them and haul the first hog out to be bled.

There are a dozen in this truck and the same in the next three. Bucky’s hands cramp from pulling the trigger, and they’re covered in blood. But after they’ve finished the first truck, Joe takes the bolt gun and gives it to someone else. 

“Okay,” he says. It’s almost a _good job_ ; at least the way he looks at her appraisingly suggests such a sentiment. Joe seems to be following a well-established pattern when he next takes her to the cutting room. Here the pig carcasses, dipped and rubbed of their hair, are chained up by their rear hooves and hung from the ceiling so that they can cut them open, genitals to throat, and carefully remove the intestines. 

“If you split the guts you spoil the meat,” Joe says. “So watch your knife.” He leaves, and Bucky watches another guy as he carefully cuts the large slit and digs into the pig’s body, drawing ropey piles of intestines into a slop bucket. The guts will be emptied and cleaned and the casings used for sausages, Bucky knows. 

She doesn’t much mind, intellectually – she’s eaten her fair share of hotdogs in her life – but she thinks, right quickly, that it’s much better to not think about the viscera, shiny and pale and full of shit, as anything destined for food. 

Ma had been annoyed at Dad when he got Bucky the job. “It’s not even kosher,” she’d said, surprising them both. Her family have never kept kosher; Bucky thinks it fell by the wayside in her mother’s life long before she even met Bucky’s father. “I don’t know why you can’t just work at the store with your father,” she’d said.

Bucky could never tell her how stifling it was. She loves her father, she does, but to have him at her shoulder every day with all the weight of expectation that falls on her as the eldest – as the one least likely to marry, as the one carrying her father’s name. It’s too much. So she told her dad that she was looking for jobs elsewhere, and he just sighed. Ma’s the one who fights battles in their house.

The next day he said he’d been in touch with his friend, Randall Smits, whom he knew from high school, and that Smits had an office job available at his slaughterhouse. The operation was small, just sixty employees, and Bucky had started out doing paperwork, answering phones, but by about a year in she was doing all the books. 

“At least you won’t be on the floor,” her mother had finally said, a few weeks in. Bucky looks down at her hands, guilt running under her skin. There’s blood caked under her fingernails, and she’s skinned her knuckles in three places. She aches all over. 

After the shift bell rings Mac finds her again. “Joe tells me you kept up,” he says. Bucky shrugs. She had tried to keep time with the guy next to her in each room, tried harder than she’s probably ever tried anything before. 

Every fella there’s been working for a year or more, mostly much more. It’s a nice place to work: good people, good pay. Most of them have a sort of surety to their movements: economical, fine, something that Bucky would almost term grace. Reminds her of the tiny quick movements of her mother sewing up some mending, or of the deft way Rebecca weaves her hair into a braid, of Steve’s easy grip around a pencil. Knowing, familiar. They know the cleanest, most efficient way of moving their wrists to get just the right cut. Know by touch rather than by sight how to clean the skin off, leaving just the muscle. Know how to leave each kind of meat clean and pretty, ready to be cured and wrapped and eaten on someone’s table. Bucky’s hands hurt with their unfamiliar toil, and she knows there’s nothing that she _knows_ like that, like memory and instinct, unless it’s maybe the feel of her fists in boxing gloves. So when Mac asks her if she can fill in again tomorrow she says yes easily.

++

Veronica wants to see _The Lady Vanishes_ , and Bucky happily takes her, even though she’s already seen it with Steve. At the theater, Veronica leans on the armrest between them, her shoulder pressing up against Bucky’s, so Bucky can feel each surprised little gasp she gives at the plot twists and turns. There isn’t much pretense here, just a need for a little subtlety in public; they’ve already fucked a couple of times, at Veronica’s boarding house, being very quiet so the gals who live one floor down won’t suspect. Bucky enjoys the teasing play of a good flirt, of being the kind of butch that’s even better than a fella, charming and just rakish enough to make a girl give her that wide-eyed surprised look of pleasure. 

They’ve been going together for a couple of months now, mostly just things that won’t look too odd for two gals to be doing together, or heading down to the one bar by the docks where two gals can do other things together, too. She’d usually take her out on a Saturday night – best for dancing, and beer, and working up a sweat – but they’ve been working on taxes at Smits & Sons and that means Bucky’s stir-crazy and bored with adding up little numbers. She’s on the floor most days of the week, now, but Smits pulls her in for big projects and then complains that she doesn’t type as fast as she used to. Bucky’s not sure – she’s never been a quick typist – but she keeps her mouth shut. One day a week on payroll and reconciling wholesale accounts is a fair enough price for the easy, instinctive physicality of being on the floor.

All that means that she’d called up Veronica on Monday evening and they’d set up a date for the very next day – “I don’t want you thinking I’m over-eager,” Veronica says over the phone, breathy and laughing as she pretends to consider. If it happens to be the night Steve’s at the Art Students League, well, that’s just a coincidence.

“So,” Veronica says as they walk outside the theater. The sun is dipping low, leaving the world in a golden glow that catches the soft red waves around Veronica’s face and sets them glittering. She tucks her arm into Bucky’s, an action skittering on the edge of dangerous, but holds it only long enough to look up and catch Bucky’s eye, bat her eyelashes, and say, “What next, handsome?”

Bucky grins, grasps her hand and lifts it over her head, giving her a quick, graceful spin that ends with Bucky’s mouth on Veronica’s knuckles, the picture of chivalry. “Darling, the evening’s only started,” she says. “I know a great place that serves up a very nice whiskey.”

“Oh, really?”

“Well, passable,” Bucky says; Veronica laughs, a breathy little sound. “My apartment.” She starts walking.

“Won’t your roommate be home?” Veronica asks, Bucky’s usual excuse. Steve’s always home on weekend nights, unless Bucky takes her out, and though Bucky doesn’t much mind coming home smelling of a dance hall, more than that would be, well, it would tell far too much, on top of being not quite polite.

“Nah,” Bucky says. “She’s in class tonight.”

Veronica’s eyes sparkle. “Lead the way.”

She doesn’t love Veronica, not really, but _god_ does she love her tits. By the time they’re in the bedroom, door kicked closed, Bucky’s got Veronica’s dress unbuttoned to her waist and shimmied off her shoulders, the strap of her slip pushed down one arm, and is rubbing her nipples through her bra. Leaning into her, Veronica groans into her mouth, hungry biting teeth on her lower lip. “God I love your tits,” Bucky says in a murmur, and Veronica just laughs.

“Better get me undressed, then, handsome,” she says, “so I can make use of that filthy mouth of yours.” She pulls at the top button of Bucky’s shirt, getting it open and off her shoulders as Bucky steps her back toward the bed. Pushing the dress off her hips, Bucky reaches down to catch the hem of her slip and shimmy it up, taking her time to let her hands skim over Veronica’s full hips. Veronica’s hands are at her waistband, flicking open the fly and shoving at them until they fall to the floor.

Reaching between Bucky’s legs, she cups her hand around her cunt. Bucky groans, mouth against Veronica’s neck. She knows some butches don’t do this, don’t let their girls touch them this way, but Veronica’s touch sends a desperate rush of heat to her cunt, and she can’t imagine stopping her when she plucks at the waistband of her shorts. 

She scrambles out of them, and unhooks Veronica’s bra as Veronica shoves her panties down, both of them hungry and impatient. Bucky tumbles Veronica to the bed, pushes her legs open, mouths at her breasts. 

Grasping the short hair at the nape of Bucky’s neck, Veronica holds her there, panting as Bucky sucks her nipple. Her hips cant upwards, dragging her wet heat against Bucky’s thigh and leaving Bucky gasping against her skin. Holding herself up on one elbow, she fumbles her other hand between them, finding the damp curls and, parting them, the hot slickness inside. Knocking her heel against the back of Bucky’s thigh, Veronica pulls her closer, panting against the curve of Bucky’s neck. 

She takes Bucky’s fingers easily, and inside she’s soft, yielding as Bucky presses upwards. She works a rhythm, hips pressing against the back of her hand as she fucks Veronica, meat of her palm rubbing clumsily against her hard little clit. Veronica gives a short cry, and finds Bucky’s mouth, biting hard on her lower lip to muffle her noises, and just as Bucky can feel her start to tighten, her thighs drawn snug against Bucky’s hips, she hears a loud creak behind her. 

Veronica’s startled gasp holds fear, not desire, and Bucky jerks away from her, stumbles to her feet, mind scrambling around her for something to wield as a weapon. But then she hears another sharp gasp, this time not Veronica but much more familiar.

In the doorway, the light from the kitchen spills across Steve’s shoulder. Her mouth twists in a harsh, shocked grimace, and her eyes are locked on Bucky. “Steve, I didn’t think you would –” Bucky takes a step forward, reaching out, and with an awkward, jerking movement, Steve steps back. She says something, but Bucky only hears, again and again, her cold, harsh gasp.

“Steve –” she says again, following her, but Steve is already out the front door. Bucky grasps the handle before realizing that she’s still stark naked. She rushes back into the bedroom; Veronica is still on the bed, sheet pulled up to half-hide her body, and blinking up at Bucky, a little dazed.

“Guess she wasn’t away,” she says, weakly. Bucky leans against the foot of the bed. Her pulse pounds in her throat. “And I guess she didn’t know this about you,” Veronica says, more gently. Bucky shakes her head; of course not. 

Her hand is sticky. She rubs it, impatiently, on the coverlet, then starts picking up her clothes, jerking them on. “I’ve got to find her,” she says. Veronica sighs. 

“Yeah,” she says, and stands up, begins to dress. She gives Bucky a pat on the cheek as she leaves the apartment. Bucky quickly realizes she has no idea where Steve might go, in a shocked panic on a cool autumn night, so after stalking around the blocks of their neighborhood, she goes home and waits. 

When Steve comes back, she doesn’t say anything, just looks away from Bucky and goes to bed. Neither of them sleep, their restless breathing ragged and out-of-sync. Through the night, Bucky thinks of a million things to tell her, things to explain, but when the morning comes, she can barely ask Steve if she wants eggs, and Steve’s relieved reply puts any thoughts of explanations out of her mind.

She sees Veronica a few more times, but Bucky can’t quite stop listening for the door even when they’re at Veronica’s boarding house, can’t quite stop hearing Steve’s pained gasp. She leaves Veronica at her door after cutting a date short, a headache coming on that throbs behind her eyes and leaves her mind fuzzy, gives her one last kiss, and doesn’t end up calling her again.

++

The summer heat swells in around them, pressing against Bucky’s skin like boiled cotton, spongey and wet. She would swear that the very walls of the apartment are sweating. It’s too hot to go out, to be stuck under the sun or pressing tight in the subway, and too hot to stay in, skin dripping and shining and wet against their near-nakedness. 

She’d like to pull the lace curtains closed, leaving the inside of their apartment masked from the courtyard just outside, and strip off her clothes entirely. Might have thought about it, back when they first moved in, but since that evening when Steve got back too early, she’s felt the way Steve’s eyes skitter over her skin and away. It’s unthinkable, making her that uncomfortable in the home they both share. By unspoken agreement, they wear necessities: a tee-shirt, a pair of briefs, a camisole, some little shorts. 

Steve doesn’t look at Bucky, not below the shoulders. Bucky doesn’t look at Steve, not when Steve can see her.

They’re trying to read, across from one another at the table with books spread open. Bucky can feel the pages wrinkle under her sweaty hands and isn’t really following the words. Steve can’t sit still, shifting every few minutes in her chair. Bucky doesn’t miss the glares directed her way each time she snaps her chewing gum; she does it again and catches Steve’s eye, grins. Steve huffs, shoves the book she’s not really been reading, either, across the table. 

“You’re insufferable,” she says, legs of her chair scraping across the floor as she stands. Bucky smiles placidly. Filling a glass with cold water from the tap, Steve drinks half of it down, then presses the glass against her temples, her abdomen. Her monthlies must be coming on soon; Bucky’s will in a day or two. 

Steve’s not very regular – hadn’t started to bleed until she was sixteen – but when it does come, every couple months, it usually hits her the same time as Bucky’s. Even after a few years, the bleeding can make her weak – anemic, the doc says – so Bucky likes to know so that she can pick up some beefsteak, ration it out over the week. Steve doesn’t like the expense, but she’ll still eat it when Bucky plates it up. 

It feels like habit, now, anyway: knowing Steve’s body, watching for signs of pain, cough, fever. Steve’s monthlies are fierce, and not easy to miss even under Steve’s annoying desire to buck up and hide it. Cramps, and an aching back and head, food that doesn’t sit quite right or comes out far too quick. Achiness beforehand and the snappish irritability that comes when your body’s working against you and you can’t even complain about being sick or it being wrong. A cold compress, a hot water bottle, a beefsteak and soft mashed potatoes. Bucky wishes she could offer more, could touch Steve’s brow and wash it all away like a miracle, or trade her places.

Bucky’s own come on without much discomfort. A little ache, a little blood, not too much to work through. It’s the days before that send her spare, two or three days when her skin throbs and aches and screams for touch. Her clothes chafe, ill-suited to the bursting surfaces of her body. On those days, she knows it’s just her body readying itself, blood flow and muscle memory, and so she doesn’t let herself linger and press into the soft, casual, all-too-few touches of Steve’s hands. 

It wouldn’t be fair to Steve. Not with the way Steve’s hands come to her, now, too hesitant; not with the way Bucky wants them, all the time, all throughout the month. She picks up girls occasionally, if they’ve got a place or if she knows for certain Steve will be out. Listens with one ear for the door, feels their bodies rub harsh together. Most of the time she takes care of herself, waits until Steve’s breath evens out and slides her hands between her legs. 

Three fingers up inside, rocking and pressing hard against the slick, soft inside of her cunt until her wrist aches and her clit is swollen. It’s only a few flicks of her fingertips before she comes, hard, the pulsing, spreading sweetness not quite erasing the clenching in her gut. Her body, preparing.

It’s worse in the heat, more unbearable, her skin sticking wetly to the chair under her bare thighs. She shifts, and wishes she hadn’t; sweat drips down the small of her back, underneath the waistband of her briefs. 

Leaning against the kitchen sink, Steve closes her eyes. She holds the mostly-empty glass between her breasts, leaving a damp trail down her stomach, dark against the pale pink of her camisole. Bucky’s left her book off, forgotten, and without her hand to hold them down, the pages flutter shut. Steve refills her water glass, drinks it. She’s doing well this summer, Bucky thinks. Not a single wet cough yet, and her collarbone doesn’t jut out quite so much as it did in the winter. 

“Let’s go to Coney Island,” Bucky says. Steve cracks one eye open, to see if Bucky’s being serious.

“Everyone in the Boroughs will be there.”

“Then we’ll be in good company.” Bucky gives her a winsome smile; Steve narrows her eyes. It’s not a no. It won’t make them feel better, but it might give a good distraction from Steve’s cramps and Bucky’s too-tight, too-full skin.

“I’m not going on the Cyclone,” Steve says.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Bucky says, with the butter-wouldn’t-melt voice that means she’s considering it. She isn’t, not really – she likes the Cyclone, but the one time she’d taken Steve on it, she had vomited on Bucky’s shoes before they were even off the ride – but she does like the way Steve’s ears pink up in annoyance.

Steve drinks the rest of her water, leaves the glass on the counter. Plucking at the wet front of her camisole, where it clings to her breastbone, she says, “I guess we’ve got to put on real clothes.” She looks murderous at the thought.

“Wear your bathing suit,” Bucky says. “We’ll swim once we get too damn hot to stand it.”

“That point has long since come and gone,” Steve says, drily, but pushes herself off the counter and goes to change. Bucky follows. They change clothes like they always do, now, facing away. Bucky puts on her bathing suit, an old-fashioned men’s wool singlet, absurd and outdated, but thick and boxy enough that under it her body is one long slim line. 

The only reason to be at Coney Island when it’s this damn hot is to swim, but the beach is a teeming crowd of people, like a hive of ants swarming. So they meander through the boardwalk first, hot and sweating but buoyed lighter by the sparking excitement of the crowd. 

They get lemonade and ice cream, sticky and dripping down their hands. Steve licks it off her wrists, too slowly; it drips faster than she can catch it, like a puppy and her own tail. Bucky eats hers in great gulping bites to avoid the same, and ends up with a frozen headache, her grimace leaving Steve crowing with laughter.

Over the crowds, they can hear the rattling of the Cyclone as it creeps up the incline, then the riders’ screams as it plummets. Steve looks a little green at just the sounds, so Bucky grabs her elbow and pulls her toward the arcade as a distraction. 

“Lemme win you a prize, Stevie,” she says impulsively. Steve just laughs, doesn’t say no. Bucky eyes up the games presented: there, down a few stalls, is a mock shooting range.

The targets are little rubber ducks, tugged along on a belt. Knock three off and you win your prize. She’s never picked up a gun, not a real gun, but the little wooden arcade rifle is sweet and familiar in her hands. She tucks it to her shoulder, feels the gentle heft and the way the barrel leans, just slightly, to her right. There’s always a trick. 

Pop pop pop, three ducks in a row. She sets the gun back down and grins at the fella behind the counter, who looks faintly impressed despite the twist to his lips. “Which one do you want, Stevie?” Bucky says, gesturing to the array of ceramic figures above the stall. 

Steve rolls her eyes, and Bucky grins harder. “That one,” she says, finally, and Bucky goes up on her toes to reach it for her. It’s a puppy, just as big as Bucky’s two palms together, and it has a little hurt paw tied up in a bandana. The paint is slapdash applied and milky-colored, cheap and gaudy, but it’ll go with the other four figures they’ve already got set up on a shelf above their stove: a monkey, a baby doll, a garish green parrot, and a surly old pirate with a corncob pipe. If she were admitting something, Bucky might own up to the fact that she only ever picks up those cheat-weighted arcade rifles to show off to Steve. 

Steve holds the puppy in her two hands, like it’s a baby bird needing coddling, as they walk away from the stall and bumps her elbow against Bucky’s arm, grinning up at her. “My hero,” she says. “You’d make a damn fine soldier.” It’s half-joking and a bit too earnest, too full up with the shimmering presence of war that lives on the summer air and has them both reading the newspaper with vigor. 

Bucky swallows, and puffs her chest up, shoulders out, adds a swagger. “I’d be the best damn soldier the US Army’s ever seen,” she says, just to hear Steve laugh. Just to avoid thinking about the way lunchtime conversation has tended to list, occasionally, toward whether or not there will be a war in Europe, and if the US will get involved if so. She grins at Steve, whose cheeks and nose are flushed pink with the sun, hair darkening with sweat around her temples.

“The ocean sounds real good right about now,” she says, though she’s half enjoying the beat of the sun across her shoulders. Steve nods; she loves to swim, and even though there are more people on the beach than Bucky’s ever seen, Steve leads her to a tiny unoccupied patch just big enough for two towels laid parallel, narrow strip of sand between them.

Steve takes a deep breath and then strips her dress off over her head and clutches it balled up in her fists, and looks at Bucky like she’s daring her to say something. Bucky’s seen the swimsuit she’s wearing before, but not on her; it’s one of Rebecca’s old ones, and it’s cut square across her hips and dips low on her chest, baring the sharp, narrow line of her collarbone and the slight rise of her breasts. It’s, god, it’s the exact color blue as her eyes, and her skin is pale and freckled all across, and it’s not at all like the childish suit she’d worn last summer, bought new by Mrs. Rogers as a birthday present when Steve was fourteen, striped and high-necked and babyish. 

Bucky breathes in through her nose, smells salt and sweat and the sticky summer sweetness of melting ice pops, and says to Steve, “You look real good.” 

Steve lets go of her held inhale and drops her dress to the towel. She plucks at the edge of the suit where it sits on her thighs, and Bucky knows she’s equivocating in her mind, wondering if Rebecca’s way of being a gal doesn’t quite fit right on her. She’s never said it, not in words, but Bucky’s seen the way her hands touch her hair over and over after Rebecca’s managed to coax it into something, the way she looks at how Bucky’s sisters wear their skirts and cross their ankles, at the way Susanna picked up the habit of holding her hand to her mouth when she laughs. Habits that never quite stuck to Bucky, and don’t quite live naturally in Steve. 

“You’re gorgeous, Steve,” she says, wanting Steve to stop tugging at the legs of her suit like she’d like it to swallow her up. And then: “Any fella would be lucky to have you,” she adds, because Steve wants to be normal, Bucky knows it. It’s not something she can help her with, it’s not, but if Steve wants it she’ll shove her along as best she can.

Steve looks up at her. There’s red spreading across her chest; Bucky hopes they haven’t already been in the sun too long. Sunburns wipe Steve out: last summer one day too long at Rockaway Beach left her feverish for two days after. “Who needs a fella,” Steve says, then looks down at her feet. Bucky’s pulse thumps. “I got my best soldier here with me.”

It’s nothing, nothing at all, just the way Steve talks at her sometimes, like they’re playing a game. Still, the comment sends a strange little flutter to Bucky’s stomach that she ignores by unbuttoning her trousers. Underneath, she’s wearing her woolen singlet suit, comically out of date, that she found in her parents’ attic. After mending a moth-hole or two, she’d appropriated it for herself, liking the way the longer legs and square-cut neck leave her body angular and long. Dropping her shirt to the ground, Bucky grabs Steve’s hand and tugs them toward the sea, through the maze of overheated bodies and brilliantly colored beach umbrellas. 

Though she’s terrible at most sports, all heart and no stamina, Steve swims like a fish. An easily tired fish, but one that can, for short times, slip through the water slick and fleet. She somersaults under the water and comes up, hair dripping, just as a wave knocks against the back of her legs. Swaying, she holds her ground, and grins up at Bucky like she did the first time Bucky backed her up in a fight.

The waves wash up Bucky’s thighs, sharp and cold; she hears her Ma’s voice telling her it’s best to just plunge in and get the shock over with, but Bucky’s never been good at doing what’s best. Instead, she takes long lunging steps against the rolling waves, letting the water soak her in increments, and watches Steve disappear underwater and bob back up, spitting a graceful fountain and blinking away the salt. Finally, when it hits her chest, Bucky holds her nose and plunges under.

It presses in on her, rocks her body, and even though her feet still brush against the sand, she feels turned over, the sky above her lost. She forces herself to stay down, even as her eyes burn, pressing her lips tight together and bracing against the battering of the tide. When her lungs ache, she bursts upward, gasps air. 

Steve hasn’t noticed – she’s a few yards away, they one or both must have drifted – so Bucky wipes the water away from her eyes and takes a few gulping breaths. The water is foamy on top, but if it were still, she would be able to push the foam away and see right down to her feet. There’s nothing hidden in its shallows, and anyway, it’s not precisely the sharks and sea-beasts that send her heart panicky and sharp. Curling her toes, she digs into the sand. Anchors. One breath, two, then she takes a couple of lunging steps and scoops up a double handful of water to throw at Steve.

Steve retaliates immediately, and then dives close enough to jump on Bucky’s back and dump a handful on her head, skinny knees locked around Bucky’s hips, her arm, slung around Bucky’s neck, warmer than the cold water. Bucky ducks under, slides away, and soon they’re wrestling, more careless than they can afford to be on the solid ground, where Steve’s fragile bones aren’t buffered by an ocean that accepts her as its own. 

She’s the first one to relent, holding her hands up in surrender to Steve’s grin. Her muscles are starting to clench, and Steve’s mouth is pale, so they trudge out of the water in tandem, Steve following Bucky, and work their way back to their towels. 

The water-logged suit sags away from her skin, drooping down between her thighs nearly comically, and she hopes the sun doesn’t become too unbearable before she’s able to dry off at least a comfortable amount. Tilting her head sideways from where she’s spread on the towel, she cups one hand to her temple for shade and watches the rise and fall of Steve’s chest. 

Her eyes are closed: pale lids, with lashes that glint in the sun. There’s more color to her mouth. While Bucky watches, Steve absently rubs her abdomen with one hand, but her shoulders are relaxed and her mouth soft. It has helped. 

Bucky’s not sure she feels helped. The pressing insistence of the water, the grit of salt and sand, the memory of Steve’s arms around her neck and thighs around her hips and laughing voice in her ear all jangle together, overwhelming. She drops her hand away, closes her eyes, feels the sun start to slough off the water and spread itself over her limbs, and wills the summer air to slow down, to quiet, to hold them in this moment. 

++

“I thought you might like it,” Steve says, very shyly, and Bucky knows she’s gaping a bit as she looks up but she can’t quite help it. It’s monumental, truly, and sometimes this thing of regular-people-are-giants – social realism, Steve’s voice supplies in her head – makes her laugh, because just making folks huge isn’t going to solve the world’s problems, by god. But this is _Steve’s_ , or partially, at least, and for a moment, standing in the empty front foyer of the Post Office, with the lights glowing golden and Steve next to her, vibrating with nerves, Bucky can see the figures through Steve’s eyes. Powerful, strong. Independent. She can’t deny the appeal.

“This one was mostly mine,” Steve says, modestly, as they stop in front of a panel with a man riveting a piece of equipment. He has big, muscled forearms and hands that work confidently on the riveter gun. “We didn’t do a slaughterhouse worker,” Steve jokes, “too gruesome for the kids.” 

“I don’t know,” Bucky says, still looking at the riveter. “I remember that meat painting you like so much. And don’t all the Dutch masters love a good dead rabbit?”

Steve jostles her. “Bourgeoisie propaganda,” she says, a laugh edging around her words. Then she looks back up at the murals, like she’s not sure. 

“They’re really good,” Bucky says, bumping her shoulder against Steve’s. “Let me buy you a drink to celebrate.”

She does, and then a second, which is just as much as Steve can handle, and means they walk home together with elbows intertwined, Bucky half holding Steve up and enjoying that she can do so without Steve protesting every step. 

“You really liked it?” Steve asks when they’re halfway home. She looks up at Bucky, face jaundiced in the streetlights but earnest. 

“Course I did,” Bucky says. “I like everything you do.” She plants a fond, sloppy kiss on Steve’s forehead, and then realizes that she, too, might be drunker than she thought. 

Steve’s forehead furrows up. Bucky loosens her grip, but Steve doesn’t step away. “It was you,” she says, snuggling in closer. “The riveter.”

“What?” Steve’s looking up at her with her eyes so wide, like Bucky hung the moon in the sky just so it could reflect down on her tonight. Or, more likely, like Bucky bought her two drinks and she has money in her pocket and her name scrawled at the bottom of a painting on a wall. 

“I was painting you,” she says, and Bucky thinks about the riveter, who’s a burly man with close-cropped hair and arms like tree trunks. “You’re so strong,” Steve says, sounding so much like a lovesick girl in the pictures that Bucky laughs. Steve huffs. “I mean it,” she says, sounding like she’s about to make a list of all the ways, so Bucky ruffles her hair, tugs her out of the way of a fire hydrant in their path.

“You put me up on a wall,” she says, which isn’t quite what she means. _You made me immortal._

“Everyone can see ya,” Steve says, to the ground. “Everyone should see you.”

“Gosh.” She feels like she should joke around here, _golly Steve I didn’t know you cared,_ but Steve is clutching to her arm like she’s the only thing in the world and looking down at her feet like she’s not sure how to move them without Bucky’s help.

“You’re so strong,” Steve says again, like it means something else. Bucky swallows. 

“It’s a good thing,” she says, finally, “if I’ve gotta carry you home.” Steve would usually protest, but she just hums and leans against Bucky, who holds her elbow close and lets the scant heat of Steve’s body warm her side.

++

_1941_

Bucky likes that Steve’s picked up a job at a bakery, and not just for the not-quite-stale bread rolls she brings home after shifts. Mrs. Hubert is stern, but keeps a kind eye on Steve, and it’s always warm in there, heated from the ovens, even in rushing chill of October, snapping into the city like a whipcrack, the last lingering brightness of summer blown away. It’s close to work, too, so Bucky can stop by once in a while, pick up a pastry to top off the cheese sandwiches she takes to work with her. 

When she brings back a couple of eclairs with her one lunch break, Joe and Leon practically beg her to tell them where she got them, so the next week she takes the two of them with her. She’d swear them to good manners, to keep on Mrs. Hubert’s good side, if it didn’t make her feel so much like her Ma. 

Leon immediately salivates over a case of pies – cellar apples and last year’s canned cherries –while Bucky takes a gander at Steve’s newest display, a whimsical towering of crossed buns. She doesn’t notice Steve come out from the back, not until she hears her voice answering a question from Joe. When she turns around, Joe is leaning against the counter, head tilted toward Steve, listening intently as she tells him something or other about the rye they use. Steve leans forward a bit, gesturing toward the case, and Joe looks where she points, using the moment to tilt his body toward hers, saying something in an undertone that makes Steve exhale, nearly a laugh, and look down at her hands.

Not even sure why, Bucky calls out Steve’s name then – “Stevie,” like she called her when they were kids, like she does when they’re teasing each other. Steve looks up, sharply, something Bucky can’t quite identify passing over her face before she’s smiling, gesturing absently to Joe, and coming around the side of the case to Bucky.

“Tell me about these eclairs,” she says, a little desperately, wanting to have Steve’s attention. 

Steve looks at her, a little strangely, then says, everyday and easy, “Fresh made this morning.”

Bucky buys one and eats it there, talking to Steve until Steve tells her, with the same weary, fond exasperation Bucky remembers from Sarah, “Chew your food before you talk, you animal.” She takes an extra-big bite, feeling the cream ooze out and smear at the side of her mouth, and grins at Steve, who opens her mouth and then, inexplicable, flushes pink and looks away. Steve leaves her to finish, walking around to help Leon, businesslike and brusque, and by then it’s past time for them to get back to work.

“I didn’t realize,” Joe says, breaking the quiet as they walk back. 

“What?”

“She your sister or something?”

“What?” Bucky says again, bewildered.

“Never mind,” he says, looking at her strangely, like Bucky’s missing something and he’s not keen to have the conversation that will fill her in. Bucky pushes it to the back of her mind.

She goes back the next week; she’s been looking forward to something sweet all day. Steve sees her when she comes in, smiling distractedly as she boxes up a dozen rolls, and Bucky wanders over to the pastry case. Little squares of cake, arranged in spiraling circles, have neat little flowers piped on top, and Bucky suspects Steve has cajoled Mrs. Hubert into letting her try her hand at icing. 

Steve comes to meet her once she’s finished with the customer. Her shoulders are sloped forward, drawn together. “Long day?” Bucky ventures. Steve nods, tight-lipped, and that’s more than enough to send Bucky’s mind to worrying.

“It’s nothing,” Steve says, like she knows what Bucky’s thinking, but she barely has the words out before she’s coughing. Bucky holds her elbow, keeps her upright as she coughs into the crook of her arm. 

“Nothing, huh,” Bucky says, drily, hoping that covers up the panic that flashes in her stomach at the ragged sound of Steve’s breathing. Steve glares at her, but she’s holding one hand to her gut like it aches.

“You come straight home when you’re done,” Bucky says, not even hiding the note of worry in her voice. Steve rolls her eyes, but doesn’t argue. Bucky’s reluctant to leave, hovers at her table until the last possible minute, watching the slow way Steve moves behind the counter. She thinks she should talk to Mrs. Hubert, tell her Steve needs a day or two off, but Steve would be livid when she found out. Bucky looks at her watch again; she needs to leave.

She hurries home after the last bell, telling herself there’s nothing to worry about. Steve wasn’t sick at all last winter, no more than a runny nose, and she only had two asthma attacks in the summer. Hopes are up; the doctors always said she might just grow out of some of it.

When Bucky pushes the door open, Steve is standing at the oven, setting the kettle down to heat. Her face, when she looks up at Bucky, is flushed, shiny, and Bucky immediately says, “You go sit down, I’ll get the tea.”

“Bucky,” Steve says, annoyed, but it comes out a little too rasping and she coughs, once and then again, after. 

“Steve,” Bucky says, in her mother’s voice; Steve narrows her eyes, doesn’t step away from the stove. She reaches up in the cupboard for a mug, but something in the movement catches her – they’re just a little too far back, she has to strain – and she falls back, coughing. Gripping the edge of the countertop, Steve stumbles back a step, back wrenched over with the force of her angry lungs. In three strides, Bucky’s by her side, one hand rubbing circles on her shaking back. 

The sounds are wet, hideous. Bucky’s slammed back into 1937 and Sarah’s coughs racking the kitchen, all through the winter as one year changed to the next. They’d let up, in the summer, only to fall back on her quickly, fatally, once the weather turned. She won’t think of it – pushes it away and concentrates on her hand on Steve’s back, on Steve’s white-gripped knuckles and the rattle of her lungs. 

Steve takes one hesitant breath and then another, cough abating. Something fluttering and panicky slows, slightly, in Bucky’s throat. Steve pushes herself to standing, unsteady on her feet, and Bucky holds onto her elbow like she’s her anchor. 

“C’mon, sit down,” she says, starting to guide Steve to the table. Steve goes willingly, so Bucky knows that fit hurt her, that her chest and guts and shoulders are aching now. They only get two steps before Steve starts up again, harsher this time. Trying to clutch at her stomach, she jerks away from Bucky’s grip, severe, racking coughs shaking her whole body; then she’s retching and vomiting on the floor.

Bucky doesn’t say the stream of _oh fuck oh god oh Steve oh_ that’s running through her head. Instead, she grasps Steve around the middle, keeping her from falling as her knees sag, and mutters something near comforting at her. 

The vomiting stops quickly, only a short, foul burst, and then Steve falls weakly against her, and Bucky bends, hooks one arm around Steve’s knees, and lifts her up. She skips the little chair at the kitchen table and takes her straight into bed. 

She misjudges the height and half-drops Steve in bed, but the hitched gasp Steve lets out doesn’t lead to a coughing fit, so it’s okay. Leaving her for a moment, Bucky goes back into the kitchen, dampening a towel and rummaging below the sink for a bucket. Adding a glass of water, she goes back in.

Steve has half-burrowed under her quilt, but she looks miserable. She takes the glass of water from Bucky gratefully and drinks it down, swishing some around in her mouth and making a sour face. Setting the bucket on the floor, Bucky sits down on the very edge of Steve’s bed, not wanting to crowd her, and holds out the towel awkwardly. She’d thought to wipe away the sheen of sweat across Steve’s brow, as she’s done many times before, but Steve is sitting up and looking at her, clammy but alert, not passed out and still. Her eyes are bloodshot from the force of her coughing, and she’s looking at Bucky with a skittish edge. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice small.

Bucky frowns. “What for?” Steve gestures between herself and the kitchen; Bucky narrows her eyes. “It’s not your fault,” she says, and Steve huffs. 

“I don’t mean to –”

“What?” Bucky thinks she knows: to make a mess, to be a burden. None of it matters. She reaches, businesslike, and wipes Steve’s temple with the towel. Steve ducks away, but when she catches Bucky’s eyes there’s no annoyance there.

“I just thought,” she says, dropping her eyes to look at her hands, “I thought that maybe it had passed.”

Of course Bucky knows what she means – hadn’t she let the same cautious hope bloom? 

“Yeah, well, it’s no surprise,” Bucky says, then finishes, before Steve’s face can fall too much, “that you’re an idiot.” She lets her grin spread wide and easy, more casual than she feels, and though she’s certain Steve’s not convinced that Bucky’s not holding onto a pile of worry, Steve does jerk her knee against Bucky’s hip and returns the smile, a little weaker. 

“I just need to sleep the night,” she says, her voice taking on a rasping edge again. Bucky nods.

“I’ll get you some more water and be back to tuck you in.” Steve rolls her eyes but doesn’t respond, and she does let Bucky tuck the covers around her after she’s had another full glass of water. When Bucky turns off the light, the room is quiet but for Steve’s harsh breath.

++

Of course, that quiet doesn’t last long. By the second morning Bucky is insisting Steve needs to stay in bed, Steve’s protests have turned from annoyed to sharp. The doc’s confirmed that it’s not TB, just a chest infection, but the only time the cough really lets up is when Steve is sitting in bed, statue-still and bored, and Bucky knows very well that that state won’t last long. 

“I’ll lose my job.”

“Mrs. Hubert already said she’d be fine for a few days,” Bucky says, quite reasonably, she thinks, given the hellish way Steve is looking at her. 

“I hate you,” Steve says, with only a little venom. Bucky leans down and kisses her forehead with a wet smack.

“I know,” she says, fending off Steve’s batting hands. “If you stay in bed another day I’ll get Ma to make you matzo ball soup,” she adds. Steve hits her one last time, but seems to decide a little more patience is worth the trade.

She does perk up after a few days, and heads back into work without even a tickling cough. Bucky keeps an eye on her, though, tracking her movements in the apartment or when they’re out together. Watching for her to pause and need to catch her breath, or to rub at her chest or throat, to shiver with a chill.

She spends a week alert like that before catching herself staring at the way the autumn light falls across Steve’s face as she sits by the window sketching, at the bloom in her cheeks and the glinting gold of her hair, at the way she catches her bottom lip between her teeth and worries at it. Steve brushes her hair off her face, leaving a smear of charcoal on her temple, and pauses to look at her drawing, tilting her head. Something clenches in Bucky’s gut, and she must make a noise, because Steve glances up at her. 

“Nothing,” she says, shaking her head a little too generously. Steve frowns, but looks back down at her drawing. Her hands on it are gentle and sure, one spread to hold the sketchbook steady on her knees, the other delicately holding a stick of charcoal. She can’t quite see what Steve’s sketching, just a couple of bold lines roughing out an architectural form across the page. 

Steve frowns at her drawing, looks outside. “Our courtyard’s boring,” she says. She flips to a clean page. “Sit still.”

“What?” Steve’s turned so that she’s looking at Bucky instead of outside. Steve gestures to her impatiently. “You wanna draw me?” She’s done it before; filled a whole book of Bucky in awkward classical positions, contrapposto goddesses and discus throwers, the month she took a figure drawing class, and borrowed bits of Bucky for her riveter mural. But this is just Bucky, sitting on the sofa not-really-reading because she’s too caught up in the furrow of Steve’s brow. 

“Yeah,” Steve says, narrowing her eyes, starting to piece together the lines. “Toulouse-Lautrec said that it’s important to draw the ugly things in life, not just the beautiful,” she says, deadpan.

“Hey! This is a masterpiece,” Bucky says, pointing at her face.

“Like a Picasso,” Steve says, then grins. “Hold still.” Bucky reaches above her head in a slow, dramatic stretch; Steve narrows her eyes. 

Settling back in, one leg drawn up on the sofa and her elbow on her knee, Bucky squares her jaw and looks at Steve, who has watched all of her fidgeting with her hand suspended above the sketchbook. 

“Good,” she says finally, her voice low. 

For the next while, Bucky watches while Steve lays down the rough outline of her face, glancing up between strokes to peer at her, head tilted, taking measures, charting lines. Her eyes on Bucky are attentive and searching, like she’s looking below her skin, like she sees the shifting, crawling itch that creeps up Bucky’s neck at the stillness in the room. To break it, Bucky fiddles her hands, picking at a stray thread on her trousers, rubbing at a grease spot. It doesn’t work. 

She lets out a breath. Steve lifts an eyebrow. “The models at school are better than you,” she says, mildly. 

“Yeah, well,” Bucky says, unable to say why the feeling of Steve’s gaze sweeping over her, peeling her apart, is suddenly so wrenching. Her skin is hot. “Gonna turn the radio on,” she says, and tunes it to a station that plays the kind of crooning that Rebecca’s trying to get her to like. Bucky has no tastes for music, not really, just something quick and jumping in the dancehall and something that will keep her mind from dwelling overly on the way Steve’s looking at her now, patient and fond and tolerant. 

Bucky settles back into her position, keeps her gaze off to one side, toward the wall. Steve’s still sick, no matter what she’d say, and if Bucky’s gotta sit on the sofa for hours staring at the water stain on the wall just to get Steve to stay still, she’ll do it.

++

Bucky’s knees tremble, and she drops to a squat before she keels over, elbows on her knees. She starts to rest her face on her hands before she realizes that they’re red and wet, covered in blood dripping slowly down to her elbows. She holds them away from her. 

Mac leans down next to her. “You alright?” She breathes, thinks. It’s not her blood. She nods.

“Yeah, just give me –” It’s not a pig’s blood, either; she’s used to that. The blood coating her hands belongs to Archie Somerset, greenhorn and jerk, whose cheek she saw hooked and split open in the bleeding room. 

He was being an asshole, which was quickly becoming absolutely nothing new. The thing about Archie was that he’d been real friendly to Bucky when he first got hired, chatting with her on breaks, listening to her attentively as she explained each step of the butchering process, even timing his clock-outs to walk with her the first couple of blocks home. She – well, she wasn’t sure exactly what it was that he wanted, though she had some ideas, but she tried to stay friendly with all the fellas at the slaughterhouse, and to keep the new guys working well.

And then he found out that she wasn’t a fella, and things turned a bit different.

It’s not as though Bucky would give a damn; first, it would be mighty hypocritical of her to worry over working alongside queers, wouldn’t it, and besides she already knows three other guys there bent the same way, because they’ve all run into one another around the bars near the Navy Yard a time or two. Archie’s not the first to make his assumptions, and not the first to react poorly when they’re proven wrong. 

But Archie being an asshole isn’t just him calling her a bulldyke and throwing out a few innuendoes; it’s him not paying a lick of attention to what he’s doing and, as it turns out, endangering himself and those working with him.

He’d been mouthing off, and she’d been tired of telling him to shut up and do his job, when he stepped backwards, catching his heel on a crack in the cement floor, and fallen sideways, right into one of the huge iron hooks used to hang animals by their rear hooves. 

Bucky had been the first one to move, grabbing him where he hung, stunned, and propping him up with one arm while she worked the hook out of his face with the other and then lowered them both to the ground. It had caught his mouth and torn backwards, leaving a ragged, gaping slash nearly to his ear, and it had bled so much as Bucky pressed her hands against it, his head in her lap. 

His eyes, looking up at her, were frantic, wide with a wild border of white, and even through the blood in his mouth he’d tried to speak. She remembers turning him, so that he wouldn’t choke, and remembers the slick, viscous feeling of his bloody muscles working under her hands. 

It had seemed forever before more competent help arrived, Mac along with a guy who just started working whose dad, she remembers later, is a doctor. He’d been able to get Bucky to release her hands, to shift Archie onto the floor instead of her lap, so that he could take a closer look, and Mac had helped her stand, took her into the hallway, and listened as she recounted the story.

“God, Mac, I’m sorry, it’s my fault, I was annoyed and I didn’t tell him to knock it off, and –” she was the supervisor in the bleeding room. This came down on her, first and foremost.

Mac nods; he doesn’t reassure or contradict her, and she appreciates that. She tells him what she remembers of the way Archie fell against the hook, because it’s important to note that their equipment didn’t malfunction, that they hadn’t left something out where they shouldn’t have. That if Bucky had been doing her job and told Archie to get it together, it wouldn’t have happened. 

“There was a lot of blood,” she says. “Will he be okay?”

“Doc’ll be able to tell,” Mac says, with the sort of calm concern of a veteran slaughterhouse supervisor. It’s not the first accident that’s happened on his watch, not even the first that Bucky’s witnessed.

She looks down at her hands for the first time. They’re crimson, well past the wrists.

Bucky doesn’t get queasy, not really; she hasn’t vomited at any of the more unsavory things she’s come across at work, or even really gotten light-headed, but looking at her hands she feels a strange swoop in her stomach and her jaw aches like she’s the one being ripped apart, and she drops to a squat.

“You alright?” Mac says. She nods, takes a few deep breaths. The air is a bit sour, but no more than usual. 

“I should –” she holds up her hands. They’ll need washing, as will the bleeding room. 

“Yup,” Mac says. She stands without assistance, swallows. Starts to walk back to the stale little washroom. “Barnes,” Mac says; she turns. “It happens. It’s not easy.” Bucky nods.

They get Archie to the hospital in an ambulance, and Bucky hoses down the bleeding room, starts work again. It’s only another hour until the final bell rings, but everyone is quiet, subdued. After she clocks out, Jimmy Riley catches up to her as she walks down the block. He’d been working in the next room over and had been one of the first to come in and help at her shouts. He’s also, incidentally, a flaming fairy, a fact Bucky only knows after recognizing him under lipstick and mascara, running into him outside a bar she sometimes goes to on Saturday nights. 

He’s nice enough, but they’re not really friends, which is why she’s surprised when he says, with genuine care, “Are you alright?”

She looks at him for a long moment. “Could use a drink,” she says. 

He cocks his head. “Yeah, alright.” 

The bar Jimmy ends up steering her toward isn’t really the type to fill up right after work, so they’re only two out of about a dozen people there. They sit at the bar, and Jimmy orders her whiskey and himself a gin and tonic and gets an odd look from the bartender. Bucky knows she probably looks like hell, ragged and pale and maybe a little bit bloodstained, and she’s spent enough times in the queer bars in the Navy Yard to know that sometimes she can’t quite be parsed, but that it’s mostly okay. 

She drinks the whiskey a little too quickly and then orders a beer. “I’ve never seen so much human blood,” Jimmy says in a lull in the conversation. Bucky coughs, then laughs. He’s looking into his glass like it holds the secrets of the universe.

“He’ll probably be okay,” she says, not sure if it’s comforting he needs.

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, distracted, so maybe not. “I, um,” he says, and turns his glass in his hands. Bucky waits. “Matthew. My – my guy – he just signed up.”

“Signed up for what?” Bucky says before her brain catches up with her. “Oh.” They’ve been losing fellas to the forces from the slaughterhouse for the past few months – the whole reason Archie was there, one of an influx of new hires. “We’re not even in the war,” Bucky says, as though she hasn’t been thinking about its imminence. The _yet_ is unspoken.

Jimmy looks at her, his face saying the same. 

She twists her beer on the bar, watching the wet slick it leaves behind. “Will you?” she says, the question no one’s gonna ask her.

“I don’t know if I’m the type of fella they want,” he says into his glass. 

“Oh, I don’t know.” Bucky bumps her elbow against his. “The things you hear, all those tight quarters?”

He rolls his eyes at her, lips curling up despite his sadness. “Not really what I meant, Barnes.” Jimmy can handle a knife and lift a haunch easily, but he’s quiet and sweet, too, the type of guy that will remember whose ma’s sick and whose kid just started school. “You’d be better at it than I would,” he says, looking at her sidelong. She’s not sure it’s a compliment.

She thinks about the way she told Steve, with such conviction, that she’d enlist. Ages ago, now, more than a year and a half. It was more than an offhand remark: a vow, a certainty. It sits on her shoulders now, heavy and present. 

“Saying I’d be good at killing people?” Jimmy looks at her sideways, considering. Her own gut answers, uncertainly, because she’s felt the way her fists get the better of her when her Irish is up, but she’d also nearly fallen to the floor at Archie’s ripped-open face.

“Maybe,” he says evenly. “But I think there’s more’n just killing people to it.” He drinks down his beer, knocks the bottom of the glass to the bar. “You feeling better?” he asks, leaning back on his stool. She glares at him, because they’ve done nothing but drown his own sorrows. He lifts one eyebrow.

“Yeah, yeah,” she says, drinking down the rest of hers. “Get home to your fella,” she says. There’s a silent _while he’s there_ tacked on the end that neither of them acknowledge. 

“And you get to your – what’s her name? Stevie?”

Bucky flushes up. “Steve’s not my –” She slides off the barstool, stands. Given what they know about each other, it’s not an undue assumption, but she feels uneasy letting it lie. 

He lifts both eyebrows, pantomimed shock, and says, “Yeah, alright,” and slaps the back of her shoulder. 

Steve is already home when Bucky gets there, and when she catches sight of Bucky, she says, “Did something happen?”

Bucky shakes her head. “Just a tough day.”

++

She hears Steve rustle around, getting ready for Mass, and rolls over, toward the wall. Her head pounds, too little sleep and too little water, even though she’d come home only just after midnight. Steve murmurs something to her as she leaves, just a _see you soon_ or something; she never asks Bucky to go to church with her or anything. Once, after they’d left school and the nuns and incense were no long compulsory, Bucky had asked Steve if she thought Bucky was destined for eternal damnation.

“I don’t know,” Steve had said, and Bucky had responded, “That’s real reassuring, Steve, thanks.” But for Steve, that’s not really what it’s about. Bucky remembers being about nine, ten, and bored listening to the day’s sermon at school, and glancing over to see Steve, eyes bright and gleaming. 

She doesn’t remember the passage exactly – could probably look it up, somewhere there’s a Bible with her name on it, a hopeful gift from one of her Dad’s aunts for a first Communion that never happened – but it was something about Michael and a dragon, and Steve followed it like it was one of the comic books they hoarded. She thinks, sometimes, that that’s what belief is about to Steve: righteousness and salvation through glory. 

It’s not totally fair, that thought; Steve is a better person than Bucky by far, even before you get the Catholic sins of being queer and Jewish and not really believing in God all that much. Steve helps their neighbors take down laundry when the drizzle starts up, and she remembers who’s had a baby recently, and she helps Susanna with her homework, and she never, ever fights for herself but always for others. Bucky knows that Steve still goes to confession, and she’s never asked her what kinds of things she confesses, because there’s a part of her that’s afraid they’re things about Bucky, who taught her to fight instead of conquering her anger, who has dragged her into this strange little life instead of letting her get on with a normal one.

Bucky’s awake now, thinking about Steve’s eternal soul, so she drags herself out of bed and down the hall to piss and brush her teeth, happy to get the scum of last night’s beers out of her mouth. She’d gone up to Sands Street, had a few drinks, eyed up a gal in a tight blue dress and then lost her in a crowd of guys in Navy whites. It was a mixed sort of bar; she probably could have found another woman to make eyes at, but the sudden press of uniforms had soured her stomach on the whole thing. A too-often occurrence, lately, Bucky losing her attention to wondering about sharp-starched wool.

She eats toast and coffee and puts some beans and carrots and other bits in broth to boil for lunch. It’s bright and chill outside, the kind of sunny that tricks you into thinking it’ll be mild, and she hopes Steve took a hat with her. 

She hasn’t: when the door cracks open, Steve’s ears are pink above her scarf. Bucky refrains from comment, but scoops her a generous bowl of soup and makes sure there’s a blanket on the sofa. Sundays are slow once Steve gets back, time stretched out and attenuated, and Bucky likes the languor of it, the drowsy softness of listening to the drag of Steve’s pencil in the gaps on the radio.

Dozing a little, Bucky feels aware of little more than Steve’s feet tangled with her own and the soft sway of the music when the radio cuts off, abruptly, and an announcer’s voice comes on. 

_“We interrupt this program for a special news bulletin. The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by air, President Roosevelt has just announced.”_

The first things Bucky sees when her mind focuses are Steve’s eyes: huge, fearful. In silence, they listen through the scant details. Bucky thinks, strangely, of Jimmy’s fella, and of Leon and Joe, who’ve both left for the Navy and the Coast Guard, respectively. Of those sailors down at Sands Street last night. 

Of Steve, and her hands fisted up. 

When the report begins to repeat, she jumps to her feet, jerks the radio quieter, unable to stand hearing it again. Her chest is working like she’s been running, heaving up and down. Steve is staring at her.

She thinks: they’ll never have another of their Sundays together again.

++

The angry sludge of January coats the sidewalks, leaving Bucky’s boots pale with salt. Nothing was as bright as it should have been, this year, everyone aware that this was the first Christmas, the first New Year’s, of wartime. Bucky tried to make Christmas for Steve every year, since Mrs. Rogers passed, but her own family wasn’t very good at it so it was generally a bit haphazard. Bucky had carried home a handful of a tree, tiny and scraggly and dry, on December 24th, and she and Steve had scrounged up a box of decorations, mostly handmade, from Steve’s childhood. In the end, they ate a very good roast pigeon and potatoes and listened to mournful carols on the radio. 

Bucky thinks she might be glad it’s passed, that they’re in the slog of a new year. It feels better than pretending to be cheerful, anyway. The few people on the streets around her seem to feel the same, sour faces all. Folks stay in more, since last month, and the steadily drizzling icy rain doesn’t help.

After working a couple Saturdays in a row, getting the office back in order after a hectic December of regular holiday ordering and panicked newly-wartime ordering, Bucky had a Tuesday off. Steve works on Tuesdays, and when Bucky leaves the apartment that morning, she tells herself she’s just going to get fresh air. Maybe pick something up for supper.

Her feet take her to the Brooklyn Federal Building, where a sign has been hastily tacked up, presumably until a more permanent version might be obtained, marking the temporary recruitment office.

She pushes open the door. The creak of its hinges is too loud in the near-empty space, and behind the desk at the front a woman looks up at her, startled. Apparently men aren’t flocking to get themselves killed on a drizzly Tuesday morning.

“Can I help you?” the woman says, before Bucky’s even up to the desk, and Bucky nearly slips on the wet floor and curses her own feet.

“I’m here to sign up,” she says, pitching her voice just a hair lower than usual. It’s not unreasonably high for a young man. Her hair drips in her eyes.

The woman looks at her, up and down. Her gaze is steely, her cap at a tight, precise angle. “These aren’t the WAAC offices,” she says, finally, her voice a shade quieter than it had been. Bucky lets out a breath, feels a hot flush suffuse her cheeks, bile in her throat.

“I, um,” she says, looking away. 

“You can’t do this,” the woman says, and Bucky wrenches her eyes back. The woman has a flush high on her cheeks, too, and looks angry. “This isn’t an option,” she says, more firmly, and Bucky wonders if she’s trying to convince herself.

“My mistake,” Bucky finally chokes out, and turns on her heel.

She doesn’t go home. It’s been a while since she’s spent a good long time at the gym; when she gets there, it’s even quieter than the recruitment office. Not bothering to change clothes, she unbuttons her shirt and leaves it on a bench, dropping her suspenders down over her hips and wearing just her undershirt and trousers. Her boxing gloves are there, on a hook with her and her dad’s shared name written on a piece of flaking tape above it: JB BARNES.

Making herself warm up properly, she works the speedbag for a few minutes, regular, quick strokes that get her shoulders going, before moving to the big, heavy punching bag. The blows she throws at it are furious and hard, jarring her arms and reverberating through her tight-clenched jaw. Those are the only sounds: her gloves hitting the bag, her uneven breathing. The smell of the place is the same, sour and dry, but with each punch Bucky feels herself pitching off-kilter, like she’s ill-fit for the space around her.

“Your form is shit,” a voice says behind her, and she turns with her fists up. Alfie looks at her dispassionately, leaning against a pillar, and she takes a breath and lets her hands fall. He’s an old friend of her dad’s, has been boxing here with him since they were both teenagers. He only drops in occasionally; of course it’s her damn luck that he has today and is looking at her like she’s transparent and obvious. 

“Haven’t I told you a million times to keep your shoulders loose?” he asks, and Bucky automatically releases the tension between her shoulder blades, a well-honed response to Alfie’s prodding. 

“I’m done anyway,” she says, unstrapping her gloves. He eyes her. If he says something sage and cutting right now, by god, Bucky will punch him, her father notwithstanding. This isn’t her teenage anger, anyway, the kind of thing neither Alfie or her dad entirely understood but could still help her work through with a good bout in the ring. 

Picking up her shirt, she wipes her forehead with the back of her forearm and pulls it on. She hangs the gloves back up on their hook, closes her eyes for a moment. “Don’t leave it here,” Alfie says. Confused, Bucky looks at him then back at the gloves. “That anger,” he clarifies. “We’ll all need that, in the coming months.” He lost three fingers in the Great War, his right fist a little off-kilter ever since she’s known him.

Wiping her sweaty hands on her trousers, Bucky nods. It hangs with her anyway, on her shoulders and under her skin; she can barely leave it behind and still be herself these days. “I’ll see you,” she says to Alfie, though she’s not sure how soon she’ll come back to the gym. Her past years are evading her, refusing to allow her to pick them up, slide them on, feel comfortable. She turns up her collar against the sleet as she shoves the door open.

++

Bucky sort of wishes she knew how to bake, that she could make something with her own two hands that Steve would bite into and close her eyes and suck her bottom lip in under her top teeth with pleasure. Chocolate, she thinks, with fresh raspberries on top. 

It’s maybe just as well she can’t, with the sugar rations on, because Mrs. Hubert knows how to make a cake with apples and honey that tastes as good as any chocolate cake, and she’s happy to make up a small one special once she knows it’s for Steve. Bucky swings by to pick it up the night before Steve’s birthday, when Steve is at the Artists League’s studios working on a couple of poster commissions. She’s been picking up a few WPA commissions here and there, since the post office, and learning lithography, screenprinting, all manner of techniques that Bucky doesn’t quite have straight in her head. 

On her birthday, Steve wakes before Bucky and goes out to pick up a newspaper, a more frequent occurrence lately. It’s full of the news that the Crimean port of Sevastopol has fallen, after months of siege. The defeat of the Soviet fort there means the Germans are open to advance on Stalingrad. 

“Happy birthday, Miss America,” Bucky says drily across the table where the paper is spread between them. Steve’s smile doesn’t reach her eyes. 

This day last year, Bucky had been fit to bursting with the excitement of a pair of Dodger’s tickets in an envelope on the table, ready to buy Steve all the hotdogs she could possibly eat. This year, the little wrapped package is slightly larger, but feels less momentous. She maybe could have gotten tickets again, but the pair of them that went to the Polo Grounds and shouted ‘til they were hoarse are not the pair sitting at the table today. 

Bucky has put aside the works to make pancakes, though, including a little jar of maple syrup and, as usual, she dishes Steve’s up first. The courtyard is buzzing outside; it’s still July Fourth, and folks’ll still find ways of celebrating – maybe now even more. Bucky figures they’ll go on up to the bridge to see the fireworks when it gets dark, and she’s got a couple of beers already in the icebox. Steve eats up her pancakes, and rolls her eyes when Bucky slides her one more as she comes to sit down, and it could be like any July Fourth for the past few years, them together in their little home.

 _Maybe the last_ , her mind whispers, unbidden. It’s been coming more often, that thought, and though it had always lived somewhere in the back of her mind – maybe the last summer before some fella finally figures out that Steve’s gorgeous and smart and talented and a catch – it now dwells somewhere near a set of plans Bucky’s been making since her visit to the recruitment office in January. 

She shoves it away, looks at Steve, who’s cutting up her last pancake into squares before eating it. Her mouth is shiny with syrup, her hair still flat with sleep on one side. She eats quickly, grinning up at Bucky as she finishes. “Thanks, Buck,” she says, just like they were kids again and Bucky’s given her a pretty new marble: her voice caught up with a little wonder. 

Bucky finishes up her own and pushes their plates to one side. “Open your present,” she says, nudging the wrapped package toward Steve. Brown waxed paper, filched from work, tied up with leftover bakery twine from Mrs. Hubert’s cake, nothing fancy, but Steve grins and works the twine off like it’s silk ribbon to be saved. 

The paper falls open, and Steve gives a little gasp as she reaches inside. In her hands, the silk unfolds like a cascade, the hem brushing the table. Bucky pushes the plates further out of the way – won’t do to get syrup on it right away – and tilts her head to see Steve’s face behind the curtain of sunshine-yellow silk. 

Her mouth is open, eyes wide, and then she blinks and for a long moment her face tightens, closes off, before she drags her gaze to Bucky and smiles. 

“I thought you deserved something pretty for yourself,” Bucky says. She doesn’t say how the yellow silk, bright like Steve’s hair, had caught her eye all the way across the floor of Abraham & Straus. She’d been thinking of a pair of gloves, maybe, or tortoiseshell combs for Steve’s hair. She can’t quite explain why she needed to get her the kind of gift a lady might use, and not the sorts of tomboyish things they’ve always fished out for one another. Something for Steve’s life without Bucky, maybe.

And though the thought of this yellow silk slip, trimmed in white lace with a little bow between the breasts, tucked away in Steve’s trousseau until her husband sees her in it, twists something hard in Bucky’s gut, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking of the silk up against Steve’s skin from the moment she saw it. Delicate little straps against the sharp rise of her collarbone, little tucks of fabric cupping the shallow curve of her breasts, the flitting cascade of the skirt skimming over her hips and thighs. 

It was goddamn selfish, but she wanted to give Steve one last thing before she left, something that she would wear close to her body, enveloping her in a way Bucky never could, and coming to know her skin and limbs in a way Bucky ached to. She wanted Steve to keep something of Bucky’s pressed tight against her, as though that might keep her safe. 

“Bucky, it’s –” Steve’s eyes shift back to the slip; her cheeks color up. “It’s beautiful,” she says, and though Bucky thinks for a minute she might add _it’s too much_ , like she usually does when Bucky treats her, she doesn’t. Her eyes just slip back to the delicate lace, to the thin straps, to her fingers touching the smooth fabric. 

She lowers it back down, lets it pool in the crinkled nest of paper. Her face is flushed up to her ears, but her fingertips rub against the fabric, as though unconsciously. “Don’t forget to treat yourself, sometimes,” Bucky says, not adding _when I go_. She thinks Steve might hear it anyway, because she inhales, sharply, and blinks, and pulls her hands back from the slip. Her mouth opens, but she doesn’t say anything, just haphazardly wraps the paper around the slip again. 

“Thank you,” she says again, hands holding the little package closed like she can’t look at it, and Bucky knows she’s spoiled it all. She’d hoped that maybe Steve had forgotten the conversation they’d had about joining up, a couple of months ago, when she’d let it slip that she’d tried once already. Steve is stubborn as a mule, and the only thing that had cleared Bucky’s head after she’d stomped out of the apartment was the knowledge that Steve’s medical history would be more than enough to assign her a 4F, even if she could somehow convince someone she was a fella. The WAAC has the same strident guidelines, and while there’s talk of establishing women’s reserve units for the other branches, Bucky’s sure they won’t be any less discerning. 

Steve can’t get herself into this war, she can’t, and that’s the only thing that lets Bucky keep trying, herself.

++

Saturday mornings, Steve rolls out early to do her shift at the bakery. Sometimes Bucky stays in bed, hungover or just enjoying the rare pleasure, but today she puts on a show of grumbling at Steve and rolling back over, feigning sleep until she hears the door close. Ignoring the guilt of lying to Steve, she gets up and walks to the closet, picking out the clothes she’s decided on after many hours’ deliberation. 

She strips naked and looks at herself in the little mirror they have hung up over the sink. It’s not like she doesn’t do so often; Steve’s teased her more than once about the way she fusses over her hair or her collar laying just so. Today, well. She has a mission.

In the mirror, her jawline looks soft. Her mouth a little full, the square of her shoulders not quite sharp enough to hide the soft rise of her breasts. Her hair too long.

She’s worn it short for years, since Ma gave in and decided Bucky was old enough to make up her own mind, so it doesn’t fall over her shoulders like Steve’s, and she certainly doesn’t fuss with it the way her sisters do, tying it up at nights or arranging frankly staggeringly sculptural rolls and curls on top. But she’s neglected it, a little, and, sweat-damp from sleep, it curls, soft at the back of her neck and falling over her forehead in delicate little sweeps. It won’t do, not if she’s going to –

She and Steve cut each other’s hair most of the time; no reason to spend money when you’ve got a pal and a pair of scissors. Steve’s is blonde and fine, resistant to holding any sort of shape or style, so Bucky usually just trims up the ends evenly where it hits just past her shoulders. She takes her time, lets the soft gold strands slip against the tender skin between her fingers. Gotta be precise. 

Bucky’s done her own a few times, too, when she’s bored or annoyed with it and Steve’s not around, so tucking the comb above her ear and bringing the scissors to it, clipping away nice and even, is not unfamiliar. It’s harder to do the back, with just the one big mirror and a tiny compact that Steve sometimes tucks in her purse, only to go too self-conscious to ever use, even in the powder room. She keeps going, though, trimming the top down to about an inch and right down to the skin on the nape of her neck. When she finally puts the scissors down, there’s a dusting of hair across her bare shoulders, and her skin prickles a bit. 

She looks in the mirror. Mouth, still full and soft, but without the little tendrils curling from behind her ears, her jaw looks sharper, and even the cleft of her chin is more apparent. Her eyes are still wide and bright, but framed by the straight line of her eyebrows they look a little starker, more severe.

She blinks; exhales; looks away. Retrieves the broom and sweeps up, then wraps her robe around her, grabs a towel, and goes down the hall to shower. When she’s done, she dresses with care: a singlet top, tight, then a white tee shirt and a sharp button-front. Trousers, boots. Her hair brushed back from her forehead, a little pomade leaving it shiny. She looks in the mirror again. Closes her eyes; breathes in; breathes out.

The recruitment center in Queens is busy, and it takes Bucky ten minutes waiting on line just to reach the front desk. The woman behind the desk barely spares a flicker of a glance at Bucky before pushing a sheet of paper to her.

“We’re out of clipboards,” she says. “Next!” Bucky blinks, and picks up the paper, moving into the waiting room area. 

It’s a standard family and medical history, and she fills it out propped against her knee, with a too-dull pencil. _James Buchanan Barnes_ , which is very nearly the truth, and her own birthdate and parents’ names. The easiest lies to tell are closest to the truth.

When she’s done, she hands it in at another desk, to another busy woman in a WAAC uniform, who flips Bucky’s paper over once, to see that she’s completed it, then drops it in a pile and says, “Wait to be called.”

As she waits, Bucky watches the woman. Papers here, papers there, the click click click of her typewriter. She hands off files as nurses walk by, not waiting for them to ask, and repeats her instructions to wait to the dozens of soldiers who follow Bucky. Her uniform fits very smartly, her hair sculpted into a set of impressive victory rolls around the angle of her cap, and her lips are crimson. 

The WAAC would have her, Bucky knows. Heck, she heard through the grapevine that Esther Schmitz, who is frankly the most terrifying butch Bucky’s ever encountered, short-shorn hair and big work boots and a gravelly voice, has joined up. Bucky hasn’t worn a skirt willingly in years, and she’s not sure she wants to see Esther in one, either, but maybe it’s not such a bad trade for a chance to do something worthwhile. 

Bucky has plenty of experience, stenographic and mechanical; she’d not want for a job in the new industries, either. The slaughterhouse needs her work more than ever; even though rationing has been expanding, an army marches on its stomach, which means the canneries will always need meat. 

She doesn’t have to go to war. Yet, there’s something that’s been nagging at her guts and at her fists for months now, something that won’t give up. She watches the WAAC type and answer her phone, and wonders if this is just what she wanted from a job. Was she already a secretary, the only change her khaki uniform? Does she want to fight, instead, or to be in charge, to plan troop maneuvers? Does she tire of people assuming she can’t do the same work as a man?

“James Barnes…Barnes.” Her name is repeated before she startles into the realization that she’s being called. She stands, fighting the schoolgirl urge to put her hand up, and follows the nurse, who walks her briskly to the exam cubicle. 

It’s not a room, exactly, just a striped curtain pulled around a corner. It doesn’t quite reach the floor, and it flutters with the bustling movement as Bucky steps inside. 

The nurse drops a chart on the table and leaves; the doctor grabs it without looking, other hand still making notes. “Shirt off, drop your trousers,” he says. Bucky freezes.

It’s not that she hadn’t thought ahead, it’s just that she hadn’t – well, she’s used to figuring it all out as she goes, bluffing and blundering, and this is the first time she’s gotten past the front desk. She unbuttons her shirt quickly enough, dropping it to the table, and unfastens her trousers. Maybe if she’s just bold about it, he won’t ask to look any closer.

As she toys with the edge of her undershirt, which hangs off her lanky frame, loose enough to hide the way she rolls her shoulders in to keep her tits close to her body, the doc flips open her chart. His shoulders still; she holds her breath.

“That’s strange,” he says, but there shouldn’t be anything strange about her form. James Buchanan Barnes, born the same day as her, chicken pox and measles and all the scrapes and scars that mark her body. “Not a lot of parents naming their kids after the fifteenth president.” She exhales, and is about to make a wiseass remark when he adds, “And only one I know of in Brooklyn.”

He turns, looks her up and down, and leans mildly against the countertop. God fucking dammit.

“What do you mean, Doctor?” Bucky says. The doctor – Dr. Bissett, who hasn’t been in Brooklyn since he was fresh faced from medical school and doing a residency with Dr. Sheehan, the ancient GP who served Bucky’s neighborhood since her grandma’s days – raises an eyebrow. Bucky hasn’t seen him since the autumn that Steve’s Ma died, when he was the one to tell them that she’d only make it a few more days, tender faced and near to crying as he broke the news to two girls who likely looked fit to punch him. 

“Jamie,” he says, and she sighs. He doesn’t look so young now, and not at all scared of her. “What are you playing at?”

“Who’s playing,” she says, straightening her shoulders. The back of her neck prickles in the cool air; the curtain ruffles with the movements of three dozen restless men. 

He frowns. “You can’t seriously think –”

“I’m fit to fight, same as any man.”

“But you aren’t. Any man,” he says. He’s looking at her kindly-like, as though she’s done something very silly and he’s tolerating it for the moment.

“I could be,” she says, and she _knows_ it sounds silly. 

“You don’t think someone will notice?”

“I don’t think they’ll care, not once I’m out there.” 

He sighs, scrubbing his forehead. He hasn’t kicked her sorry ass out yet, though, and that’s promising.

“Why do you want to go, anyway? War’s ugly, Jamie; it’s not the same as alley fights.” Of course he’d remember that; he’d patched Steve up half-a-dozen times and her once or twice, at Steve’s insistence. Back then, she’d just thought of her own embarrassment under his impatient gaze. She wonders now if he knew it was like to come home with bruised fists for being different on the playground or the street, a half-black boy with his mind set on medical school. 

“You were just a kid at the last, same as me,” she spits back. “Don’t act like you know.” His lips thin.

“I know the men I see every day at the army hospital,” he says. “I know the chunks of their bodies they’re missing. I know the way they scream in what little sleep they have.” He stares at her; she grits her teeth. “It’s no place for anyone,” he says with finality. 

“It’s happening, though. I gotta – I gotta do my part.”

He’s silent for a long moment. Bucky resists the urge to squirm; she doesn’t like standing still. “There’ll be places for women. They needed them last time, they’ll need you this time.”

“I’m not a fucking nurse or secretary,” Bucky spits. “That’s not what I –”

“What you want?” he interrupts, derisively. 

“Doctor?” A nurse flips open the edge of the curtain and peeks in, her gaze respectfully averted away from Bucky. Dr. Bissett steps back, putting space between them. “The line’s getting backed up,” she says, hinting at a question.

“I’ll be a moment,” he says. She lingers for one long, disappointment-filled moment, then nods sharply and draws the curtain closed again. 

“If anyone finds out,” Dr. Bissett says, low, and Bucky’s breath rushes out of her. He’ll do it, he will. 

“I won’t tell a soul,” she says, “and if you use that doctorly handwriting to sign your name, no one’ll be able to tell it was you.”

“I don’t mean about _me_ ,” he says, and gestures to her chest. She squeezes her fists together, doesn’t cross her arms over her chest. “It’s war, Jamie, there’s not a lot of privacy. And not always much kindness.” He doesn’t spell it out, but she knows what he means. 

“I can take care of myself,” she says. It’s not always been true, but, well.

“You’re fucking crazy,” he says, a bit of Brooklyn breaking out of his collected, medical school tone. She grins at him, straightens up her shoulders.

“They say the best soldiers are,” she says. 

++

They make quick work of things, the Army. The ink’s barely dried on her 1A stamp before she’s shuffled to the uniform clerk, who glances her up and down then pulls a stack of fabric from a low-down corner and shoves it at her. “Next!” he calls before she’s quite figured out what to do with herself. 

Back home, she pulls the curtains, shuts the door tight, and strips naked. The dress uniform fits well, if not perfectly. It’s just a little too big across the shoulders, the shirt collar loose enough to hook three fingers in, but the jacket buttons smoothly over her chest and is boxy enough to square off her hips. Pushing what’s left of her hair back, she settles the cap and turns to the mirror.

Under its brim, her brows are straighter, heavier, and her chin more shadowed. The large, square pockets of the jacket disguise any soft rise, and the trousers fall straight to the laces of her boots. She straightens the jacket, brushes lint from the lapel; inside the still-stiff wool her movements are brusquer. Her heart pounds; her throat heaves up, heavy and nervous and unbelieving.

Drawing her lips together, she tries to look stern, serious. 

She looks at her watch. Steve will be home soon. With one last look in the mirror, Bucky strips the uniform off, folds it carefully, tucks it in an extra pillowcase and down in the bottom of her closet.

Her papers require her to show up for training in three days. Three days to make sure Steve will be okay without her, three days to give her something good to hold on to, once Bucky’s gone. Three days to make sure all those that need to know do. Mr. Smits won’t take her leaving easily; turnover’s too frequent for comfort these days, without long enough training periods. Nonetheless, Bucky refuses the small knot of guilt in her stomach, willing it away. 

Her parents, her sisters, now. Well. She can’t walk out of here to what might, in fact, be her death and let her family believe some lie. Or, worse, not know that Bucky’s even over there fighting up until they get a telegram. She can’t – this isn’t a secret she can keep, not this way. But her Ma might never talk to her again. 

And Steve. Steve will hate her. The heavy dread pressing in on her chest, making her feel like her breath can’t come, is knowledge enough of that. Three days to lie to Steve, to make sure that if she walks out the door with Steve hating her, she’ll at least have some last memories. 

One, two, three. Go.

++

Her C.O.’s an absolute _tyrant_. She’s not surprised, but god do her feet ache. She thinks of writing it all to Steve, telling her about the extra runs and the interminable cleaning duties to which she keeps getting assigned. If she were here, Steve would laugh, and ask her what she did to deserve it this time, just like all the times Bucky got detention. She doesn’t much like the thought of getting a talking-to from whoever’s on censor duty this week, though.

Laughing to herself, Bucky picks up her pencil, balancing a sheet of paper against a book on her knee. _My C.O. reminds me of Mr. Herbert_ , she writes, _very committed to his duties. I’ve learned a lot from him already_. Steve will know; Steve will remember the time Bucky got a whole month of detention from Mr. Herbert, a whole month of Steve making up excuses to stay late at school and sneak into the classroom to keep Bucky company. Herbert hadn’t found out until the last week, and maybe the thought of managing them both stilled his hand because he hadn’t added any time to her sentence.

When she arrived at Fort Dix, on a bus with two dozen other green recruits mouthing off, she’d vowed to keep to herself, to stay in line, to not draw attention. Eyes forward, mouth shut, sir yes sir, et cetera. In basic, that apparently doesn’t matter much, and it only took two days for Bucky’s mind to be well and properly fucked over with all the soldiering she doesn’t know how to do. 

She keeps up on morning runs, but her form is off. She does fifty push-ups, but she’s at the end of the row and therefore more visible. She salutes, but not quickly enough; she responds to an order, but too quickly. 

In the mess that day, Oakley had sat down heavily beside her and dropped his head into his hands, very narrowly missing a forehead full of slop-with-meat. “ _Mediocrity’s not a virtue,_ ” he says, in a dead impersonation of Sergeant Elliot. “I wasn’t even last,” he whines, sounding bewildered. Bucky refuses to complain, but does give him a sympathetic look that he completely misses in his wallowing. 

Across from them, Corcoran looks impassive. Course he does, the bastard. He’s a fucking show-off and built like a prize bull; Elliot loves him. Bucky points her fork at him. “If you say something about working harder, I will stab you.” He blinks. He’s not at all impressed by Bucky, which of course makes her want to make him be impressed, and not in the _oh I didn’t know girls could actually hit that hard_ way that guys like him usually say they are, after she’s knocked them down. 

But then, here, Bucky’s a too-skinny mid-rate recruit who keeps up but doesn’t impress. And she shouldn’t; even though she’s self-aware enough to know how much she’s aching for a begrudging nod of respect from any higher-up, she also knows that it’s best if she keeps a middling profile. Attention breeds questions. 

“It’s not about working harder,” a fella down from them a bit says. Hayes or Cleveland or something else presidential; Bucky should remember if only in solidarity. “You gotta stop thinking it’s personal.”

“Sure feels personal,” Oakley mutters. Secretly, Bucky agrees, at least a bit. The first week of Elliot’s eyes on her, she felt sure he was parsing together something strange in the way she moved. In the weeks since, it just seems he’s taken a hellish sort of shine to her and maybe eight or ten others who get extra laps and cleaning duties disproportionately often. 

“Strategy,” Hayes-Cleveland-Garfield – Garfield? – says, leaning in a little. He’s got the attention of their whole row. “See, you pick on the weakest, you just end up burning them out. Fine if you want elites, but not if sheer numbers are the aim. Plus, then your middle sorts –” here he gives an indifferent gesture to Bucky’s whole side of the table, which to be fair is not untrue – “they’ve got no reason to improve. Plus, if there’s any righteous, justice-minded sorts, they tend to get bent out of shape about C.O.s picking on the little guys.” 

Bucky snorts. God, isn’t that true. “So the C.O. chooses fellas from the middle, barks at them, adds some extra slop duties –”

“Keeps everyone on their toes,” Garfield – yes, probably – finishes, nodding. 

“Fascinating,” Corcoran says drily, finishing his slop and pushing back from the table, managing to put his disdain into every economical movement of his muscled frame. Bucky resists giving the bird to his retreating back.

“So why just the guys in the middle? Why not –” She gestures with her fork again, at Corcoran’s absurdly large shoulders. 

Garfield’s quiet for a minute, and he waits for everyone to swivel their heads toward him before he starts to speak. Bucky could laugh. A showman, great. “They will,” he says, clearly with great pleasure. “If they’re any good at their jobs.” Bucky raises one eyebrow. “Listen, right now we’re not a team. We’re shitheads who need to be taught to listen, and they achieve that with unpredictability. Next stage, though, that’s when we learn _teamwork_.” He says the word like he’s amused by it, like it’s a fancy trick for a bunch of performing dogs. 

Bucky gets it, though. “Superstars are bad at teamwork,” she says, and Garfield nods. 

“So just wait,” he says, satisfied, and leans back. 

“How the fuck do you know this?” one of the guys on his right asks.

Garfield shrugs. “Army brat.” 

It does help, thinking of it all as one big strategy game. Bucky’s never been very good at chess, but she knows how to assemble a back-alley baseball team and how to cut a mid-rate bully with a single offhand remark and how to find her opponent’s weaknesses in the ring. It’s not that different. So she pays a little more attention to the way Elliot’s eyes scan and linger, and figures out where to position herself, where to run, the right sharp, automaton movements to make. Habits she could have used in Brooklyn, god knows.

Bucky returns to the scrawled page balanced against her knee. She ends the letter _yours_. They haven’t written to each other like this before, never more than a couple of stilted postcards on the rare summer vacation. After four years living on top of one another, Bucky doesn’t know how to put down in words what she’s doing, what she’s feeling. 

The early terror has mostly passed. It’s different, being a man, a soldier, than it is slipping around and through the spaces between bulldagger and fag in the hazy streetlamp light of the Navy Yard, than it is letting new guys make assumptions at the slaughterhouse. Bucky’s slipped into it, though, more than just pulling it on with her uniform; it’s settled down into her bones. 

Besides, there’s so much more to be terrified of: even now, in training, getting her head shot off by a green recruit, of their transport ship being torpedoed in the middle of the Atlantic before they even get to Europe, of failing her fitness tests and being sent home after all. She lets the fear stay a while, figuring there will be much scarier things to come, best to get used to getting on with things while it lurks, a bad houseguest. 

Everything is so close at the camp: buildings tucked tight together, long benches at long tables with too many men eating at once, rows and rows of bunks in rooms where every sound ricochets and repeats. Bucky’s used to sharing her space, to listening to the rise and fall of Steve’s breath, to her cough in the winter and rattle in the spring; Steve’s worst pneumonia has nothing on the sound of fifty men snoring, farting, and groaning. Just now, as she sits with one leg dangling off her bunk, letter propped on her lap, there’s a dozen guys around her doing something similar, writing or reading or lying back on their bunks and staring at the ceiling. 

One of many; invisible; that’s what she needs to be. 

Garfield’s five bunks down; he’d jerked his chin at her in recognition when his section comes in from evening drills. _I made a friend_ , she thinks of writing to Steve, like she’s away at summer camp. 

She hasn’t heard back from Steve. She hopes her letters are making it; she’s sent two already, both signed: _Yours, Bucky_. She hopes Steve isn’t ignoring them, still angry at her. It was a mean, dirty trick to take Steve to the StarkExpo before telling her and lighting out in the morning, she knows it was. But she couldn’t stomach doing it any other way, so she took Steve out, and plied her with ice cream and sodas and bright, glorious glimpses of what a better future could hold, and then told her that she’s leaving. 

Steve still wants to sign up, too – Bucky’d tried to swear her off of it, but she knows the stubborn tilt of Steve’s shoulders like she knows her own hands – but even if she could pass, her health would be a barrier no matter what. Bucky doesn’t even bother to lie to herself about that: she’s fucking relieved. Steve Rogers doesn’t even belong in the same world as warfare, because she plays by rules of moral conduct no one else follows. 

She still fights with her fists, though, some traitorous other part of Bucky says. And whose goddamn fault is that, who took her to the boxing ring and molded her soft hands into fists and taught her to protect her jaw and to jab fast? They both tussled when they were little, sure, but that was kid stuff. No excuse to keep living your life like you’re looking for fights.

Bucky’s under no illusions about what kind of bad influence she is on Steve. 

She reads the letter again. It’s upbeat, cheerful even, like the last two have been. Gripping about the food, a few anecdotes about fellow recruits – not anything of significance, because so far they mostly just coexist. They eat by company, but train in sections, so while she’s passing familiar with the faces of the 150-odd men of B Company, she mostly only knows the names of her section and some stray others. No friends, but no enemies yet either. She doesn’t write too much about actual training, just says its hard work, because there’s no need to feed Steve’s desperate wish to get herself beat up. 

No _I miss you_. She does, of course; they’ve seen each other near every day since Bucky was nine and Steve seven, and Steve’s presence lives in her limbs like her blood. The way she moves, the way she breathes. Bucky also limits herself to just one question or comment about Steve’s health per letter, which she knows will be enough on its own to earn a complaint about Bucky’s mother-henning. 

She also puts in a little check-in about the apartment, that she hopes Steve’s housekeeping hasn’t fallen lax without her there to pick up the slack. She can picture Steve rolling her eyes. In the months before she left, the long unsteady months of America throwing itself into war, Bucky had saved up most of her paycheck, not going out much, avoiding the temptation to buy new clothes even with the specter of rationing hanging over them. It had been worth it when she’d been able to put two months’ rent – all of it, not just her portion – in their landlady’s hand. It would hardly see Steve through the whole war, but it would give her a while before she’d need to worry.

Bucky might have also had a conversation with Rebecca about the spare bed. The little office she works at, typing and filing, is about halfway between their family home and Steve and Bucky’s apartment; it wouldn’t be a hassle to move. It might not work out, but she recognized the bright little glimmer in Rebecca’s eye when she said she’d think about it. 

Folding up the letter, she tucks it into an envelope and scrawls their address on the front. She hopes she’ll get one back, soon.

++

A letter from Steve finally shows up when basic’s almost over, and Bucky doesn’t even have to read it to know that something’s happened – something good, though. The first page is written in the crabbed-up handwriting that Steve gets when she’s tired, hands shaky and cramping, but when Bucky flips it over it’s a little clearer, more solid. 

_I’m pretty tired_ , she writes, as if she didn’t give it away with the slant of her letters, _not sick, just working hard, so don’t worry_. It’s light on details: no gossip from the neighborhood, not even any appearances of familiar names. _I’m trying out for this job; I think I could be useful._

Bucky feels a quick rush of relief, that Steve’s letter seems to hold no rancor, that maybe she’s forgiven. If it’s this new job giving Steve a magnanimous streak, Bucky doesn’t much care what it is she’s doing. Which, she doesn’t at all hint at, not even a bit, so Bucky preoccupies herself for a minute imagining what it could be. Recruitment posters, maybe – Steve’s friends Ben and Bernarda had accurately predicted what a racket that would be. You could hardly walk down the street without the image of some burly fella or clear-eyed gal calling out to you to sign up, volunteer, buy bonds, grow food. Grow food where, Bucky wants to know.

The page doesn’t say much else, a few stray lines with questions about Bucky’s training, and how she’s holding up, and if the food’s that bad, and then _Yours, Steve_. She hadn’t sent it yet, though, because the back page is dated a week later and has more of the same, except with a tenor of excitement.

 _Something’s happening, Buck, something that could mean a real chance for me. I can’t tell you much – I don’t know a lot of the details myself – but just trust me, alright?_

Bucky’s stomach flips; the number of times she’s heard _just trust me_ in Steve’s voice and it didn’t end with one or both of them bruised up or in trouble, well, she can count them on one hand. 

_Don’t worry,_ she wrote, underlining it three times. _This is the right choice, and I promise I’ll tell you everything soon. Keep yourself safe._

_Yours forever,_  
_Steve_

Bucky takes a deep, hard swallow, and tucks the letter back into its envelope, and tells herself not to worry. Steve gets herself into all kinds of hairbrained situations, more gumption and anger than sense, and she’s stayed alive so far. The traitorous, sensible part of Bucky’s brain reminds her that she was there to help Steve out of a lot of them, which is just not goddamned useful at all in her present situation. 

Steve will write again soon, with more news, Bucky tells herself. She rubs her fingers across the stamp on the envelope, cancelled in a town she doesn’t recognize in New Jersey. Steve could be just down the road from her, she thinks, and somehow it makes her ache more to wonder what Steve’s doing in Jersey than to think of her tucked up at home in their own apartment, safe and familiar.

Nothing else comes from Steve before Bucky’s company get their orders.

++

Bucky’s sitting between Lee, whose shoulders are wide enough to crowd into Bucky’s space, rubbing against her with every bump, and Edison, a skinny guy from Ala-fucking-bama or some such place; he talks with a slow drawl and looks at Bucky like she’s stupid when she fires back at him in her best curse-filled Brooklyn. There are a hellava lot more guys who sound like Bucky than Edison at Fort Dix, but the Army does like to mix them up a bit, so there are also the flat, untoned sounds of the Northwest, the long vowels of Minnesota, Lee’s casual California flatness, like he’s a star in the pictures, marking them all like badges. Some folks clump together with people who know the same landmarks and shops – a whole street in Queens signed up at once, nine men who spend all their downtime together – but Bucky’s hedged away from anyone who says _Brooklyn_ with the same sort of bursting, whaddaya gonna do about it pride that she’s heard from her own mouth once or twice. It ain’t big, Brooklyn, and she’s not going to have some jerk from Bushwick say something about how he knew a guy who knew a dyke called Barnes. 

There’s nervous chatter all around them, in all the accents of the United States – a real goddamn melting pot – but Bucky stays quiet. At her feet, her pack is taut, stuffed tight, too new and clean. Not likely to stay that way for long, because at the end of this drive is the Atlantic Ocean and one very large boat waiting to take them to England. To the war. 

They were supposed to have a day of leave, but something with the boat schedule and the weather had them moving up a day. None of them will say a word, but they’re all thinking it, roiling with the resentment and the fear that this’ll be it. A boat ride to England, a smattering of more training, and then war. They deserve something better – hell, even the tightness around Sergeant Elliot’s mouth when he announced it says that – but this is what the Army is giving them.

Bucky hadn’t told Steve about the day’s leave, so she didn’t have to tell her she wouldn’t be coming after all, and somewhere in the pit of her rumbling stomach she feels a bite of relief. She’d had such plans, to show up at the door and knock and grin so big at Steve’s stupid surprised face, and then take them out for steaks. But she’s already walked out that door once, and there’s a small part of her that’s afraid she wouldn’t be able to do it again. 

She did have to scrawl off a quick note to her family, though, with heartfelt apologies and promises to send some souvenirs from England. Her ma had finally written to her, after a couple of weeks, her letter joining a couple from Rebecca with scrawling postscripts from Susanna and Miriam. Rebecca’s angry at her, she knows; when war was announced, the neighborhood had changed. The families with boys in them suddenly had a little bubble around them, like if you looked at Mrs. Offerman, with her three sons all of age, the wrong way it might be all over, their fates sealed. The Barnes family was untouched from all that, and Rebecca had admitted her relief one Shabbat. 

When Bucky’d told them, she’d turned away. 

Tucked away next to the letters from Steve, Rebecca, and her Ma is one from her father, fat and long, that came just days earlier. When she’d told them, Dad had let Ma rail and shout until she fell back, angry and breathless, and then he’d cleared his throat and looked at Bucky and said, “I thought I’d raised you to know better,” like a slap across her face. And then he’d stood up and left, leaving Bucky reeling, gasping.

But his letter – his letter makes her understand, she thinks, if only a little. _I never wanted my girls to grow up thinking war was something righteous_ , he’d started, and it had socked her in the chest like an unseen punch. He never talked about his time in France, never, not even to complain about the ache in his leg that was worse in the winter. _They told us our sacrifice would end all war, but I think we were all too smart to believe that. And here we are again. They’re saying the same things once more, that this war is necessary, and while I don’t know if that’s at all true, I do know that you have to fight like it’s just your gun between you and the ending of the world if you’re gonna make it out._

And then he’d told her a story. Of how he signed up, and of fighting, and of losing the men at his sides. Things she’d felt stupid for not knowing, not really, not beyond what they learned in school and saw at the pictures. 

The words had swum together in the blur of her welling eyes, and she’d wiped tears away so much that she knew her eyes were red-rimmed. She remembers that Garfield had paused at the foot of her bunk, asked her kind of quiet if it was bad news. She’d shaken her head, hard, choked out a reassurance, and he’d left. She wants to cry now, thinking about it. 

_You will not be the same when you come back_ , he’d written at the end. _This world and whatever you think of the next will be changed. You must fight, and you must bring yourself home anyway._

The truck clatters to a stop, and they file out, packs still unfamiliar on their shoulders. In the docks, the prow of a ship rises high above them, vertiginous and inky black, and water splashes up on its bow. The air is warm and choked with salt, and Bucky thinks of grabbing Steve’s hand and plunging into the cold of the ocean, afraid of tumbling upside down and coming out changed.

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the first poem of H.D.'s WWII _Trilogy,_ "The Walls Do Not Fall":
> 
> There is a spell, for instance,  
> in every sea-shell:
> 
> continuous, the sea-thrust  
> is powerless against coral,
> 
> bone, stone, marble  
> hewn from within by that craftsman,
> 
> the shell-fish:  
> oyster, clam mollusc
> 
> is master-mason planning  
> the stone marvel...
> 
> Come visit me on [tumblr](lbmisscharlie.tumblr.com) if you'd like.


End file.
